4 research outputs found
Late assignment of syntax theory: evidence from Chinese and English
The attraction of the well-structured arguments of the mental syntactic processing
device (parser) in Chomsky’s theory has led to an overemphasis on syntactic processing
to the exclusion of semantic and other processing in the initial sentence processing stage
(Frazier & Clifton, 1996; Gibson & Hickok, 1993; Pickering & van Gompel, 2006). The
current thesis joins some others (Green & Mitchell, 2006; MacDonald et al., 1994;
Townsend & Bever, 2001, etc.), investigating the timecourse of the information
processing of sentences.
The first interest centres on ambiguous sentence resolution. Crosslinguistic studies have
shown different resolutions in processing the relative clause (RC) attachment as in “the
servant of the actress who was on the balcony” (Cuetos & Mitchell, 1988). Three
studies confirmed that there is an NP-low preference in Chinese; however, this effect
was delayed in comparison to its English counterparts. The NP-low preference can be
explained by syntax-first, syntax parallel, and syntax later theories. However, the delay
effect questions the traditional syntax-first theories. This leads to the second
investigation of direct comparison of the timecourse of syntactic and semantic
processing using anomalous materials in English and Chinese. Two experiments have
confirmed that the syntactic anomaly is recognised later than semantic anomaly in both
languages.
The empirical investigation in the current thesis used various methodologies, including
self-paced reading, a questionnaire, and eye-tracking studies, where the design of
materials strictly followed linguistic principles. All the results support the late
assignment of syntax theory (LAST) (Townsend & Bever, 2001). In fact, LAST can
explain most of the evidence for syntax-first and syntax-parallel theories, and it is in
line with the latest development of the linguistic UG theories (the Minimalist
Programme)
A Statistical Approach to the Alignment of fMRI Data
Multi-subject functional Magnetic Resonance Image studies are critical. The anatomical and functional structure varies across subjects, so the image alignment is necessary. We define a probabilistic model to describe functional alignment. Imposing a prior distribution, as the matrix Fisher Von Mises distribution, of the orthogonal transformation parameter, the anatomical information is embedded in the estimation of the parameters, i.e., penalizing the combination of spatially distant voxels. Real applications show an improvement in the classification and interpretability of the results compared to various functional alignment methods
A comparison of the CAR and DAGAR spatial random effects models with an application to diabetics rate estimation in Belgium
When hierarchically modelling an epidemiological phenomenon on a finite collection of sites in space, one must always take a latent spatial effect into account in order to capture the correlation structure that links the phenomenon to the territory. In this work, we compare two autoregressive spatial models that can be used for this purpose: the classical CAR model and the more recent DAGAR model. Differently from the former, the latter has a desirable property: its ρ parameter can be naturally interpreted as the average neighbor pair correlation and, in addition, this parameter can be directly estimated when the effect is modelled using a DAGAR rather than a CAR structure. As an application, we model the diabetics rate in Belgium in 2014 and show the adequacy of these models in predicting the response variable when no covariates are available