Research article summary (published 30 Dec 2002):

Studying the grammatical aspects of word recognition: lexical priming, parsing, and syntactic ambiguity resolution.

Full Abstract

Two experiments are reported examining the relationship between lexical and syntactic processing during language comprehension, combining techniques common to the on-line study of syntactic ambiguity resolution with priming techniques common to the study of lexical processing. By manipulating grammatical properties of lexical primes, we explore how lexically based knowledge is activated and guides combinatory sentence processing. Particularly, we find that nouns (like verbs, see Trueswell & Kim, 1998) can activate detailed lexically specific syntactic information and that these representations guide the resolution of relevant syntactic ambiguities pertaining to verb argument structure. These findings suggest that certain principles of knowledge representation common to theories of lexical knowledge--such as overlapping and distributed representations--also characterize grammatical knowledge. Additionally, observations from an auditory comprehension study suggest similar conclusions about the lexical nature of parsing in spoken language comprehension. They also suggest that thematic role and syntactic preferences are activated during word recognition and that both influence combinatory processing.

Author information

Author/s: Novick, Jared M (JM); Kim, Albert (A); Trueswell, John C (JC);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, 3815 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. jnovick(-atsign-)psych.upenn.edu

Grants: 1-R01-HD37507 (Agency:NICHD NIH HHS)

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.; Research Support, U.S. Gov't, P.H.S.

Journal: Journal of psycholinguistic research (J Psycholinguist Res), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2003-Jan; vol 32 (issue 1) : pp 57-75

Dates: Created 2003/03/21; Completed 2003/06/18; Revised 2007/11/14;

PMID: 12647563, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 2/18/2009, IMS Date: 18 Feb 2009 00:00:00)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Humans Learning Linguistics

Recognition (Psychology) Semantics Vocabulary

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