Verb Bias in Mandarin Relative Clause Processing

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Syntactic and semantic interplay during Chinese text processing.

by Tang Siu-Lam.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1996.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 48-54).Appendix in Chinese.Acknowledgements --- p.IAbstract --- p.IITable of Contents --- p.IIIAppendix --- p.IVIntroduction --- p.1Parsing Models --- p.3Possible Causes for the Discrepancies Observed in Past Studies --- p.7Language Specific Properties and Parsing --- p.13The Present Study --- p.15Experiment1 --- p.19Method --- p.22Results and Discussion --- p.25Experiment2 --- p.28Method --- p.30Results and Discussion --- p.30Experiment3 --- p.35Method --- p.38Results and Discussion --- p.38General Discussion --- p.45References --- p.43Appendix --- p.55"Instructions used in Experiments 1, 2, and3" --- p.5

Contrastive grammar : a theory and practice handbook

En consonancia con los lineamientos del programa vigente de Gramática Contrastiva, materia incluida en el programa de estudios del Traductorado de Inglés de la Facultad de Lenguas, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, el objetivo principal de Contrastive Grammar: A Theory and Practice Handbook es brindar a los estudiantes un manual que combine las gramáticas descriptivas del inglés y del español. No pretende ser una revisión completa de todas las diferencias lingüísticas existentes entre ambas lenguas: por el contrario, el objetivo del presente manual es combinar información teórica clave con prácticas variadas respecto de estructuras dispares que representan la fuente más frecuente de interferencia entre los dos sistemas.Fil: Gómez Calvillo, M. Natalia. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina.Fil: Meehan, Patricia. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina.Fil: Díaz, M. Josefina. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina.Fil: Rolfi, Laura. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina

How Do People Process Ambiguous Strings

This article combines ambiguity phenomenon with Chinese word segmentation to observe how human being conduct language processing to clarify ambiguity between overlapping ambiguity and combination ambiguity. Artificial intelligence will easily missegment these two strings, while the study tries to introduce optimality theory to discover possible base of these two types of ambiguity comprehended by general people. According to the result, the key to clarify ambiguity is context, idiomaticity and word frequency

Processing of Arabic Diacritical Marks: : Phonological-Syntactic Disambiguation of Homographic Verbs and Visual Crowding Effects

Diacritics convey vowel sounds in Arabic, allowing accurate word pronunciation. Mostly, modern Arabic is printed non-diacritised. Otherwise, diacritics appear either only on homographic words when not disambiguated by surrounding text or on all words as in religious or educational texts. In an eye tracking experiment we examined sentence processing in the absence of diacritics, and when diacritics were presented in either modes. Heterophonic-homographic target verbs that have different pronunciations in active and passive (e.g., برض /daraba/, hit; برض /doriba/, was hit) were embedded in temporarily ambiguous sentences where in the absence of diacritics, readers cannot be certain whether the verb was active or passive. Passive sentences were disambiguated by an extra word (e.g., ديب /bijad/, by the hand of). Our results show that readers processed the disambiguating diacritics when present only on the homographic verb. When disambiguating diacritics were absent, Arabic readers followed their parsing preference for active verb analysis, and garden path effects were observed. When reading fully diacritised sentences, readers incurred only a small cost, likely due to increased visual crowding, but did not extensively process the (mostly superfluous) diacritics, thus resulting in a lack of benefit from the disambiguating diacritics on the passive verb

A Study of L2 English L1 Chinese Native Speakers’ Acquisition of Chinese Topic-comment Constructions

The study conducted a research on L1 Chinese and L2 English speakers’ acquisition of Chinese topic-comment constructions. Several results were found. First, the type of the topic, the position of the topic, and the English proficiency did exert influence on Chinese native speakers’ perception of Chinese topic-comment constructions. To analyze Chinese native speakers’ perception of Chinese topic-comment constructions, three aspects need to be considered. Second, backward transfer from English to Chinese seemed to occur in high English proficiency group when they comprehended the Chinese topic-comment constructions. For the high English proficiency group, because of the backward transfer from English to Chinese, they seemed to have got used to subject-prominence feature of English and unlearnt the topic-prominence feature of Chinese. Therefore, when they encountered sentence that topic was placed in complement clause, they still felt acceptable. Another explanation is that they appeared to transfer the strategy used in processing English garden path sentences into Chinese, which facilitated their understanding of Chinese garden path sentences (in this study, it is the construction whose topic is in complement clause). Third, when participants, dealt with the constructions that moved-topics are in complement clause (Chinese garden path sentences), they tended to adopt the late closure strategy and minimal attachment strategy, which undermined their acceptability of this kind of sentences