Capturing Online SRC/ORC Effort with Memory Measures from a Minimalist Parser

2025-01-01

A parser for Minimalist grammars (Stabler, 2013) has been shown to successfully model sentence processing preferences across an array of languages and phenomena when combined with complexity metrics that relate parsing behavior to memory usage (Gerth, 2015;Graf et al., 2017; De Santo, 2020b, a.o.).This model provides a quantifiable theory of the effects of fine-grained grammatical structure on cognitive cost, and can help strengthen the link between generative syntactic theory and sentence processing.However, work on it has focused on offline asymmetries.Here, we extend this approach by showing how memory-based measures of effort that explicitly consider minimalist-like structure-building operations improve our ability to account for word-by-word (online) behavioral data.

Investigating Syntactic Biases in Multilingual Transformers with RC Attachment Ambiguities in Italian and English

ArXiv.org · 2025-04-14

This paper leverages past sentence processing studies to investigate whether monolingual and multilingual LLMs show human-like preferences when presented with examples of relative clause attachment ambiguities in Italian and English. Furthermore, we test whether these preferences can be modulated by lexical factors (the type of verb/noun in the matrix clause) which have been shown to be tied to subtle constraints on syntactic and semantic relations. Our results overall showcase how LLM behavior varies interestingly across models, but also general failings of these models in correctly capturing human-like preferences. In light of these results, we argue that RC attachment is the ideal benchmark for cross-linguistic investigations of LLMs' linguistic knowledge and biases.

The Problem-Ladenness of Theory

Computational Brain & Behavior · 2024-10-16 · 3 citations

Plausibility and Early Theory in Linguistics and Cognitive Science

Computational Brain & Behavior · 2024-01-17 · 3 citations

Online evidence for pseudo-relative effects on Italian RC attachment resolution

Language Cognition and Neuroscience · 2024-07-24 · 1 citations

This study investigates the resolution of relative clause attachment ambiguities, focussing on the availability of Pseudo-Relative Small Clauses (PRs) in Italian. The PR-first hypothesis posits that, when controlling for other factors, PRs are preferred over relative clauses due to their structural simplicity, leading to an apparent preference for “high attachment” in PR-licensing languages. Through a self-paced reading experiment, this study examines how PR availability affects ambiguity resolution in Italian, and how it interacts with locality principles during online sentence processing. We find a significant slowdown in the LA condition with PR-licensing verbs, also tied to lower comprehension accuracy, and unclear evidence for an advantage of LA in non-PR contexts. Overall, our results add support to the PR-first hypothesis for Italian, while opening new questions about the interplay of structural ambiguity, locality, and language-specific properties.

Exploring variation in English and Italian relative clause attachment: The role of coordination

Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America · 2024-05-15

This study investigates the effect of coordination on the resolution of relative clause attachment ambiguity in English and Italian. We also examined the interplay of RC length and DP positions on attachment preferences in coordinate structures, conducting a partial replication of previous results on English (Hemforth et al. 2015). In two offline force-choice tasks, English speakers favored local attachment, while Italian speakers showed a strong preference for non-local attachment across all conditions. This pattern aligns with established variation across the two languages, but interestingly deviates from earlier reports showing the effects of RC-Head type, RC length, and DP position on attachment decisions. Our findings thus suggest that further attention needs to be paid to the complex interaction of different, potentially understudied, structural factors when investigating disambiguation mechanisms across languages.

‘Language in the United States’: An innovative learner-centered, asynchronous general-education course in linguistics

Language · 2023 · 2 citations

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Artificial Intelligence

LIN 200 ‘Language in the United States’ is a large general-education course dealing with linguistic diversity in the United States. It is taught online in an asynchronous format and attracts hundreds of students each semester. The pedagogical innovations adopted in this course include the use of guest lectures by leading experts in the field, the design of discussion board activities to facilitate interaction among students and with instructors, and the organization of the material into adaptable learning modules. We adopt a learner-centered approach using the backward-design framework and applying the community-of-inquiry model. The result is a course that succeeds in achieving its main learning goals: to introduce students to the vast linguistic diversity in the United States and to the basic principles of linguistics, in particular, that human language is primarily spoken or signed (not written), that every human group has its own language, and that all languages are equally capable of expressing any human thought or emotion, although their social prestige may differ.

An action–reaction influence model relying on OSN user-generated content

Knowledge and Information Systems · 2023-01-24 · 3 citations

The problem-ladenness of theory

2023-12-19 · 3 citations

The cognitive sciences are facing questions of how to select from competing theories or develop those that suit their current needs. However, traditional accounts of theoretical virtues have not yet proven informative to theory development in these fields. We advance a pragmatic account by which theoretical virtues are heuristics we use to estimate a theory’s contribution to a field’s body of knowledge, and the degree to which it increases that knowledge’s ability to solve problems in the field’s domain, or problem-space. From this perspective, properties that are traditionally considered epistemic virtues, such as a theory’s fit to data or internal coherence, can be couched in terms of problem-space coverage, and additional virtues come to light that reflect a theory’s alignment with problem-having agents and context in a societally-embedded scientific system. This approach helps us understand why the needs of different fields result in different kinds of theories, and allows us to formulate the challenges facing cognitive science in terms that we hope will facilitate their resolution through further theoretical development.

Mathematical Linguistics and Cognitive Complexity

2022-01-01