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Measuring language
(2004)
The study of language, its processing and its bearing on human cortical processes are all extensive domains of investigation in their own right. In this overview tutorial we limit ourselves to a sample of core illustrative issues. Our central aim is to demonstrate how complexity within the language faculty arises from two a priori distinct sources: the computational complexity inherent in the grammar of the language system itself and the procedural complexity resulting from marshalling processing resources in order to produce or interpret utterances that correspond to the grammar. Distinguishing between these two sources of complexity is a current goal in investigations of the human language faculty. The combination of quantitative approaches with newer qualitative approaches to the analysis of electro-cortical behaviour associated with carefully controlled language paradigms represents a new approach to clarifying this central issue
We describe an experiment that investigated the failure to license polarity items in German using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). The results reveal distinct processing reflexes associated with failure to license positive polarity items in comparison to failure to license negative polarity items. Failure to license both negative and positive polarity items elicited an N400 component reflecting semantic integration cost. Failure to license positive polarity items, however, also elicited a P600 component. The additional P600 in the positive polarity violations may reflect higher processing complexity associated with a negative operator. This difference between the two types of violation suggests that the processing of negative and positive polarity items does not involve identical mechanisms. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved
We describe a part of the stimulus sentences of a German language processing ERP experiment using a context- free grammar and represent different processing preferences by its unambiguous partitions. The processing is modeled by deterministic pushdown automata. Using a theorem proven by Moore, we map these automata onto discrete time dynamical systems acting at the unit square, where the processing preferences are represented by a control parameter. The actual states of the automata are rectangles lying in the unit square that can be interpreted as cylinder sets in the context of symbolic dynamics theory. We show that applying a wrong processing preference to a certain input string leads to an unwanted invariant set in the parsers dynamics. Then, syntactic reanalysis and repair can be modeled by a switching of the control parameter - in analogy to phase transitions observed in brain dynamics. We argue that ERP components are indicators of these bifurcations and propose an ERP-like measure of the parsing model
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(2004)