Hierarchial chunking in sentence processing

Abstract

In order to evaluate a left-to-right hierarchical chunking model of sentence perception, Johnson’s Hierarchical Clustering Scheme (HCS) technique was applied to data obtained from sentence intelligibility tests. One hundred and twenty Ss listened to sentences disturbed by white noise. After each presentation they wrote down what they had heard. For each sentence, a table of conditional probabilities p(j/i) was computed, where p(j/i) is the probability that word j had been correctly identified. given correct identification of word i. This was done for all i’s and j’s from the sentence. HCS analysis of the off-diagonal submatrices for which words i precede words j (“forward conditional probabilities ”) yielded satisfactory results. Apparently there is a latent hierarchical structure to these data. The large chunks that appear from these analyses do generally correspond to major syntactic constituents. Minor constituents, however, are very often not reflected in the chunking pattern.