Crocker M.W., Pickering M., Clifton C. (eds.) Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing

Издательство Cambridge University Press, 2000, -376 pp.The chapters in the present volume constitute a selection from the papers presented at AMLaP-95, the first conference on "Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing." AMLaP-95 came about when members of the Human Communication Research Centre at the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow decided to have a small workshop in which a few psycholinguists from the United States could get together with a few European researchers and share research ideas. These organisers envisioned a meeting of researchers who are particularly interested in interdisciplinary approaches to psycholinguistics, researchers who could discuss their progress in bringing techniques of experimental psychology, linguistics, and computer science to bear on questions of how people understand and produce language.
An announcement of the workshop resulted in an unexpectedly large number of enthusiastic responses and requests to participate, and the small workshop grew into a two-day conference in Edinburgh, with invited and presented papers and two poster sessions. It quickly became clear that there was a demand in Europe for a meeting like AMLaP-95, a need similar to that met by the annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing in the United States.
The AMLaP meeting emphasises bringing computational, linguistic, and psychological perspectives to bear on questions of language processing. Its scope covers a broader range of topics, from word recognition to discourse comprehension, in addition to sentence processing. Further, to encourage contributors to emphasise the relevance of their work to key theoretical issues, the AMLaP meetings were designed to have a specific focus on architectural issues in psycholinguistic theory. The papers and posters presented at the conference were of gratifyingly high quality and indicated that there would be a continuing demand for an annual conference like AMLaP-.
95. This need has since resulted in AMLaP meetings in Torino, Italy; again in Edinburgh; and in Freiburg, Germany.
A few contributors to AMLaP-95 were asked to prepare written versions of their presentations for the present volume. A selection of presentations was chosen which would present a fair sampling of the approaches represented at the conference and constitute a useful high-level introduction to current psycholinguistic research. The authors were asked to present "position statements" which would be accessible to psycholinguistic newcomers and to highlight the relevance of their work to issues of the architecture of the human sentence processing system. The organisers of the conference, Matt Crocker and Martin Pickering, together with Chuck Clifton, wrote an introductory chapter intended to provide a guide to the psycholinguistically uninitiated. This guide surveys the field of psycholinguistics, discusses the concepts of architecture and mechanism in cognitive theories, and provides a brief preview of the chapters that follow.Architectures and Mechanisms in Sentence Comprehension.
Part I Frameworks.
Evaluating Models of Human Sentence Processing.
Specifying Architectures for Language Processing: Process, Control, and Memory in Parsing and Interpretation.
Modeling Thematic and Discourse Context Effects with a Multiple Constraints Approach: Implications for the Architecture of the Language Comprehension System.
Late Closure in Context: Some Consequences for Parsimony.
Part II Syntactic and Lexical Mechanisms.
The Modular Statistical Hypothesis: Exploring Lexical Category Ambiguity.
Lexical Syntax and Parsing Architecture.
Constituency, Context, and Connectionism in Syntactic Parsing.
Part III Syntax and Semantics.
On the Electrophysiology of Language Comprehension: Implications for the Human Language System.
Parsing and Incremental Understanding During Reading.
Syntactic Attachment and Anaphor Resolution: The Two Sides of Relative Clause Attachment.
Cross-Linguistic Psycholinguistics.
Part IV Interpretation.
On Interpretation: Minimal 'Lowering'.
Focus Effects Associated with Negative Quantifiers.
Constraints and Mechanisms in Theories of Anaphor Processing.