Abstract
Up until now, studies of natural language processing and acquisition in relation to Universal Grammar Chomsky, 1982 and 1987) have been conducted independently to a large degree. When they have been related, e.g. in studies of relations between language learnability and parsability, these studies have mainly argued that learnability and parsability put functional constraints on Universal Grammar. In contrast, in this paper, we will pursue a program of study of the relations between language processing and acquisition which hypothesizes that Universal Grammar itself significantly determines certain aspects of language processing as well as language acquisition. In particular, we will hypothesize that parameter setting in UG has as one deductive consequence, a systematically different organization of parsing across language types. Since we consider that parameter-setting for UG occurs very early, we predict that this differential organization of parsing is a characteristic of processing in very early stages of language acquisition, as well as in the adult
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Bibliography
Abney, S.: 1986, ‘Functional elements and licensing’, paper presented to GLOW, Gerona Spain.
Abney, S.: 1987, ‘Licensing and parsing’, in S. Berman, J.-W. Choe, and McDonough (eds.), Proceedings of NELS 17, 1–15, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Amherst, MA.
Abney, S. and Cole, J.: 1986, ‘A Government-Binding parser’, in S. Berman, J.-W. Choe, and McDonough (eds.), Proceedings of NELS 16, 1–17, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Amberst, MA.
Bates, E., MacWhinney, B., Caselli, C., Devescovi, A., Natale, F., and Venza, V.: 1984, ‘A cross-linguistic study of the development of sentence interpretation strategies’, Child Development 55, 341–354.
Berwick, R.: 1986, Computational Linguistics, manuscript, MIT.
Bever, T. and Townsend, D.: 1979, ‘Perceptual mechanisms and formal properties of main and subordinate clauses’, in W. Cooper and E. Walker (eds.), Sentence processing: Psycholinguistic studies presented to Merrill Garrett, 159–226, Lawrence Earlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ.
Carroll, J. M., Tanenhause, M. K., and Bever, T. G.: 1978, ‘The perception of relations: The interaction of structural, functional and contextual factors in the segmentation of sentences’, in W. Levelt and G. Floresd’Arcais (eds.), Studies in the Perception of Language, 187–218, John Wiley & Sons, New York.
Chomsky, N.: 1982, Some concepts and consequences of the theory of government and binding, MIT Press, Cambridge,MA.
Chomsky, N.: 1987, Language in psychological setting. Sophia Linguistica: Working papers in linguistics 23, The Graduate School of Languages and Linguistics, Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan.
Cuetos, F. and Mitchell, D. C.: 1988, ‘Cross-linguistic differences in parsing: Restrictions on the use of the Late Closure strategy in Spanish’, Cognition 30, 73–105.
Flores d’Arcais, G.: 1978, The perception of complex sentences’, in W. Levelt and G. Flores d’Arcais (eds.), Studies in the perception of language, 155–185, John Wiley & Sons, New York.
Fodor, J., Bever, T., and Garrett, M.: 1974, The psychology of language, McGraw Hill, New York.
Forster, K. I.: 1966, ‘Left-to-right processes in the construction of sentences’, Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior 5, 285–291.
Forster, K. I.: 1968, ‘Sentence completion in left-and right-branching languages’, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 7, 296–299.
Frazier, L.: 1985, ‘Syntactic complexity’, in D. Dowty, L. Karttunen, and M. Zwicky, (eds.), Natural Language Parsing 129–189, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Frazier, L.: 1987, ‘Syntactic Processing: Evidence from Dutch’, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 5, 519–559.
Frazier, L. and Fodor, J. D.: 1978, ‘The sausage machine: A new two-stage parsing model’, Cognition 6, 291–325.
Frazier, L. and Rayner, K.: 1988, ‘Parameterizing the language processing system: Left-vs. right-branching within and across languages’, in J. Hawkins (ed.), Explaining language universals, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
Gleitman, L. and Wanner, E.: 1982, ‘Language acquisition: the state of art’, in E. Wanner and L. Gleitman (eds.), Language Acquisition: the State of Art, 3–48, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Gorrell, P.: 1987, Theoretical and methodological issues in natural language processing, unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Connecticut.
Haegeman, L.: 1984, ‘Clauses and definite NP-anaphora’, Linguistic Inquiry 15, 4, 712–715.
Hirsh-Pasek, K., Kemler Nelson, D., Jusczyk, P., Wright Cassidy, K., Druss, B., and Kennedy, L.: 1987, ‘Clauses are perceptual units for young infants’, Cognition 26, 269–286.
Holmes, V. M.: 1973, ‘Order of main and subordinate clauses in sentence perception’, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 12, 285–293.
Kaplan, R. M.: 1972, ‘Augmented transition networks as psychological models of sentence comprehension’, Artificial Intelligence 3, 77.
Kimball, J.: 1973, ‘Seven principles of surface structure parsing in natural language’, Cognition 2, 15–47.
Kornfeld, J.: 1973, The influence of clause structure on the perceptual analysis of sentences, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.
Koster, J.: 1984, ‘Global harmony’, Tilburg papers in language and literature 61, Tilburg University, The Netherlands.
Kubozono, H.: 1987, The organization of Japanese prosody, unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Edinburgh.
Kuno, S.: 1973, The structure of the Japanese language, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Kuno, S.: 1974, ‘The position of relative clauses and conjunctions’, Linguistic Inquiry 1, 117–136.
Kurtzman, H.: 1985a, Studies in syntactic ambiguity resolution, Indiana University Linguistics Club, Bloomington, IN.
Kurtzman, H.: 1985b, ‘On-line probe recognition latencies within complex sentences’, Language and Speech 28, 2, 143–156.
Levin, H., Grossman, J., Kaplan, E., and Yang, R.: 1972, ‘Constraints on the eye-voice span in right and left embedded sentences’, Language and Speech 15, 30–39.
Lin, L.-J.: 1985, ‘A syntactic analysis system for Chinese sentences’, unpublished MA thesis, Taiwan National University, Taiwan.
Lin, L.-J., Huang, J., Chen, K.-J., and Lee, L.-S.: 1986a, A Chinese natural language processing system based upon the theory of empty category. Proceedings of 5th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence of American Association of Artificial Intelligence, pp. 1059–1062.
Lin, L.-J., Chen, K.-J., Huang, J., and Lee, L.-S.: 1986b, SASC: A syntactic system for Chinese sentences. Proceedings of 1986 International Conference on Chinese Computing.
Lust, B.: 1981, ‘Constraints on anaphora in child language: A prediction for a universal’, in S. Tavakolian (ed.), Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theory, 74–96, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Lust, B.: 1983, ‘On the notion “Principle Branching Direction”, a parameter of Universal Grammar’, in Y. Otsu, H. VanRiemsdijk, K. Inoue, A. Kamio, and N. Kawasaki (eds.), Studies in generative grammar and language acquisition, 137–151, International Christian University, Tokyo.
Lust, B.: 1986, ‘Introduction’, in B. Lust (ed.), Studies in the acquisition of anaphora, Vol. 1, Defining the constraints, 3–103, Reidel, Dordrecht, Holland.
Lust, B.: Universal grammar and the initial state: Cross-linguistic study of their relations, Bradford Books/MIT Press, (in preparation).
Lust, B. and Chien, Y.-C.: 1984, ‘The structure of coordination in first language acquisition of Mandarin Chinese: Evidence for a universal’, Cognition 17, 49–83.
Lust, B. and Mazuka, R.: 1986, ‘Universals in first language acquisition: Grammatical competence or processing strategies’, paper presented at Biennial Conference of Society for Research in Child Development, Baltimore.
Lust, B. and Mazuka, R.: 1989, ‘Cross-linguistic studies of directionality in first language acquisition: Response to O’Grady, Suzuki-Wei and Cho, 1986’, Child Language 16, 665–684.
Lust, B., Solan, L., Flynn, S., Cross, C., and Schuetz, E.: 1986, ‘A comparison of null and pronominal anaphora in first language acquisition’, in B. Lust (ed.), Studies in the acquisition of anaphora, vol. 1, Defining the constraints, 245–277, Reidel, Dordrecht, Holland.
Lust, B., Wakayama, T., Snyder, W., Mazuka, R., and Oshima, S.: On the first language acquisition of null anaphora in Japanese, unpublished manuscript, Cornell University, (in preparation).
MacWhinney, B., Bates., E., and Kliegl, R.: 1984, ‘Cue validity and sentence interpretation in English, German and Italian’, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 23, 127–150.
Marcus, M.: 1980, A theory of syntactic recognition for natural language, MIT, MA.
Marcus, M., Hindle, D., and Fleck, M.: 1983, ‘D-theory: Talking about talking about trees’, Proceedings of the 21st meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics, 129–136.
Marcus, M. and Hindle, D.: 1986, Manuscript handed out in class at the 1986 LSA Summer Institute. CUNY/Bell Laboratories.
Marslen-Wilson, W.: 1973, ‘Linguistic structure and speech shadowing at very short latencies’, Nature 244, 522–523.
Marslen-Wilson, W.: 1975, ‘Sentence perception as an interactive parallel process’, Science 189, 226–228.
Marslen-Wilson, W., Tyler, L., and Seidenberg, M.: 1978, ‘Sentence processing and the clause boundary’, in W. Levelt and G. Flores d’Arcais (eds.), Studies in the Perception of Language, 219–246, John Wiley & Sons, New York.
Matsumoto, Y., et al.: 1983, ‘BUP: A bottom-up parser embedded in Prolog’, New Generation Computing 1(2), 145–158.
Mazuka, R. and Lust, B.: 1985, A cross-linguistic test of the main clause effect in young children’s syntactic processing: A study of Japanese, paper presented at Boston University Conference on Child Language.
Mazuka, R. and Lust, B.: 1988, ‘Why is Japanese not difficult to process? A proposal to integrate parameter setting in Universal Grammar and Parsing’, in J. Blevins and J. Carter (eds.), Proceedings of NELS 18, 333–356.
Mazuka, R.: 1989, Processing of Japanese garden path-, center embedded-, and multiply center embedded sentences: preliminary results from an eye movement study, paper presented at CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, March.
Mazuka, R.: 1990, Japanese and English children’s processing of complex sentences: an experimental comparison, Ph.D. Dissertation, Cornell University.
Mazuka, R.: Processing of forward and backward anaphora in Japanese: An eye movement study, (in preparation).
Okumura, M.: 1986, Nihongo rikai system ni kansuru kisoteki kenkyu (Basic research on Japanese comprehension system) PROLOG ni yoru shizen gengo shori gijutsu ni kansuru kisoteki kenkyu [I], (Basic research in natural language processing technics using PROLOG), (in Japanese), Tokyo Kogyo Daigaku Johokogakuka, Tanaka Kenkyushitsu Kenkyuseika TR-1 (Technical Report TR-1, Tanaka Research Lab., Dept. of Information Technology, Tokyo Institute of Technology).
Pereira, F. C. N. and Shieber, S. M.: 1987, PROLOG and Natural-Language Analysis, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford, CA.
Sato, P. T.: 1988, ‘A common parsing scheme for left-and right-branching languages’, Computational Linguistics 14, 20–30.
Smith, K. and McMahon, L.: 1970, ‘Understanding order information in sentences: Some recent work at Bell Laboratories’, in G. B. Flores d’Arcais and W. J. M. Levelt (eds.), Advances in Psycholinguistics, Amsterdam, North-Holland.
Takakura, S.: 1986, Einichi kikai honyaku shisutemu ni okeru henkan jisho no jido sakusei ni kansuru kisoteki kenkyu (Basic research on automatic generation of a tanslation dictionary for an English-Japanese machine translation system), PROLOG ni yoru shizen gengo shori gijutsu ni kansuru kisoteki kenkyu [I] (Basic research in natural language processing technics using PROLOG), (in Japanese) Tokyo Kogyo Daigaku Johokogakuka, Tanaka Kenkyushitsu Kenkyuseika TR-1 (Technical Report TR-1, Tanaka Research Lab., Dept. of Information Technology, Tokyo Institute of Technology).
Tyler, L. and Marslen-Wilson, W.: 1978, ‘Some developmental aspects of sentence processing and memory’, Child Language 5, 113–129.
Ueda, M.: 1984, Notes on parsing in Japanese, manuscript, University of Massachusetts.
Valian, V.: 1986, Parsing and positive evidence in language acquisition, unpublished manuscript, Wellesley College.
Wanat, S. F.: 1971, Linguistic structure and visual attention in reading, Ph.D. Dissertation, Cornell University.
Woods, W.: 1970, ‘Transition network grammars for natural language analysis’, Communications of the ACM 13, 591–606.
Yngve, V.: 1960, ‘A model and a hypothesis for language structure’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 104, 444–466.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1990 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mazuka, R., Lust, B. (1990). On Parameter Setting and Parsing: Predictions for Cross-Linguistic Differences in Adult and Child Processing. In: Frazier, L., De Villiers, J. (eds) Language Processing and Language Acquisition. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3808-6_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3808-6_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-0-7923-0660-3
Online ISBN: 978-94-011-3808-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive