Danny Dixon
Pronouns: he/they
Research Mentor(s): Lisa Levinson
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Linguistics / LSA
Program: UROP
Session: Session 4 (1:40pm – 2:30pm)
Authors: Danny Dixon, Lisa Levinson
Abstract
Much research has been done to elucidate the human brain’s capacity to process sentences despite the ambiguities present in language. This research has shed light on various components of what clearly is a complex and sophisticated system which utilizes syntactically relevant lexical information of verbs, frequency information of possible syntactic structures, and relevant contextual information to make sense of ambiguous sentences (Gennari and Poeppel 2003; MacDonald et al. 1994; McKoon and Love 2011, McKoon and Macfarland 2000; Trueswell et al. 1993). The goal of the present work is to illustrate how the insights provided by prior research fit together into a general model of sentence processing. To do this, a literature review was conducted, examining several articles which offer key results and theoretical frameworks to the study of sentence processing. The findings of these publications were then analyzed to produce visual models of how the components in the sentence processing mechanism interact to interpret language successfully despite ambiguity. These visual models will unify prior findings about the nature of human sentence processing, and they may give direction for future research by highlighting aspects of sentence processing that are not well defined by the model and by raising questions about how the models fare when representing other languages.
