Surprisal, the PDC, and the primary locus of processing difficulty in relative clauses
Of the ambitious purview of MacDonald's (2013) article, we find the part fleshed out in most concrete detail—the comprehension consequences of her Production-Distribution-Comprehension (PDC) theory, the easiest to comment upon. Such a theory as she has sketched out would be extraordinarily comp...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
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Frontiers Research Foundation
2013
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/80342 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5912-883X |
| _version_ | 1826194119321452544 |
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| author | Levy, Roger Gibson, Edward A. |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences Levy, Roger Gibson, Edward A. |
| author_sort | Levy, Roger |
| collection | MIT |
| description | Of the ambitious purview of MacDonald's (2013) article, we find the part fleshed out in most concrete detail—the comprehension consequences of her Production-Distribution-Comprehension (PDC) theory, the easiest to comment upon. Such a theory as she has sketched out would be extraordinarily compelling: a theory that, in contrast with accounts relying on “innate parsing biases,” posits that “comprehension results reflect distributional regularities in the language” that “comprehenders are generating expectations for upcoming input,” places “emphasis on the role of learning probabilistic constraints,” makes use of “extensive language corpora” to “[permit] comprehension researchers to examine the relationship between production patterns … and comprehension behavior” and thereby “reframes our understanding of sentence comprehension.” The only way we can see such a theory being more compelling would be for it to be specified precisely enough to be computationally implementable and to make quantitative and localized predictions about the processing difficulty of every word in a sentence that could be tested rigorously on a variety of linguistic materials. A naïve reader of MacDonald's article may not know that such a theory already exists and has been highly successful. This theory, known as surprisal, was first proposed by Hale (2001), building on early ideas by Attneave (1959) from the dawn of information theory (Shannon, 1948) and cognitive science. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T09:51:17Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/80342 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | en_US |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T09:51:17Z |
| publishDate | 2013 |
| publisher | Frontiers Research Foundation |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/803422022-09-26T14:05:46Z Surprisal, the PDC, and the primary locus of processing difficulty in relative clauses Levy, Roger Gibson, Edward A. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy Levy, Roger Gibson, Edward A. Of the ambitious purview of MacDonald's (2013) article, we find the part fleshed out in most concrete detail—the comprehension consequences of her Production-Distribution-Comprehension (PDC) theory, the easiest to comment upon. Such a theory as she has sketched out would be extraordinarily compelling: a theory that, in contrast with accounts relying on “innate parsing biases,” posits that “comprehension results reflect distributional regularities in the language” that “comprehenders are generating expectations for upcoming input,” places “emphasis on the role of learning probabilistic constraints,” makes use of “extensive language corpora” to “[permit] comprehension researchers to examine the relationship between production patterns … and comprehension behavior” and thereby “reframes our understanding of sentence comprehension.” The only way we can see such a theory being more compelling would be for it to be specified precisely enough to be computationally implementable and to make quantitative and localized predictions about the processing difficulty of every word in a sentence that could be tested rigorously on a variety of linguistic materials. A naïve reader of MacDonald's article may not know that such a theory already exists and has been highly successful. This theory, known as surprisal, was first proposed by Hale (2001), building on early ideas by Attneave (1959) from the dawn of information theory (Shannon, 1948) and cognitive science. 2013-09-03T15:51:26Z 2013-09-03T15:51:26Z 2013-05 2013-02 Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle 1664-1078 http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/80342 Levy, Roger, and Edward Gibson. “Surprisal, the PDC, and the primary locus of processing difficulty in relative clauses.” Frontiers in Psychology 4 (2013). https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5912-883X en_US http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00229 Frontiers in Psychology Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. application/pdf Frontiers Research Foundation Frontiers Research Foundation |
| spellingShingle | Levy, Roger Gibson, Edward A. Surprisal, the PDC, and the primary locus of processing difficulty in relative clauses |
| title | Surprisal, the PDC, and the primary locus of processing difficulty in relative clauses |
| title_full | Surprisal, the PDC, and the primary locus of processing difficulty in relative clauses |
| title_fullStr | Surprisal, the PDC, and the primary locus of processing difficulty in relative clauses |
| title_full_unstemmed | Surprisal, the PDC, and the primary locus of processing difficulty in relative clauses |
| title_short | Surprisal, the PDC, and the primary locus of processing difficulty in relative clauses |
| title_sort | surprisal the pdc and the primary locus of processing difficulty in relative clauses |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/80342 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5912-883X |
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