Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing

This timely book, written by leading experts, brings together linguistic, psychological and computational perspectives on fundamental structures and mechanisms of sentence processing. It covers new research on syntactic and lexical mechanisms, the interaction of syntax and semantics in language comprehension, and the implications for cognitive architecture in general.

The architectures and mechanisms underlying language processing form one important part of the general structure of cognition. This book, written by leading experts in the field, brings together linguistic, psychological and computational perspectives on some of the fundamental issues. Several general introductory chapters offer overviews on important psycholinguistic research frameworks and highlight both shared assumptions and controversial issues. Subsequent chapters explore syntactic and lexical mechanisms; statistical and connectionist models of language understanding; the crucial importance of linguistic representations in explaining behavioural phenomena; evidence from a variety of studies and methodologies concerning the interaction of syntax and semantics; and the implications for cognitive architecture. The book concludes with a set of contributions on select issues of interpretation, including quantification, focus and anaphora in language understanding. Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing will appeal to students and scholars alike as a comprehensive and timely survey of recent work in this interdisciplinary area.