Ambiguous Sentences Research Articles

Cognitive control mechanisms in language processing: are there both within- and across-task conflict adaptation effects?

Cognitive conflict is regarded as a crucial factor in triggering subsequent adjustments in cognitive control. Recent studies have suggested that the implementation of control following conflict detection might be domain-general in that conflict experienced in the language domain recruits control processes that deal with conflict experienced in non-linguistic domains. During language comprehension, humans often have to recover from conflicting interpretations as quickly and accurately as possible. In this study, we investigate how people adapt to conflict experienced during processing semantically ambiguous sentences. Experiments 1 to 3 investigated whether such semantic conflict produces the congruency sequence effect (CSE) within a subsequent manual Stroop task and whether Stroop conflict leads to adjustments in semantic processing. Experiments 4 to 6 investigated whether semantic conflict results in conflict adaptation in subsequent sentence processing. Although processing conflict was consistently experienced during sentence reading and in the Stroop task, we did not observe any within-task or cross-task adaptation effects. Specifically, there were no cross-task CSEs from the linguistic task to the Stroop task and vice versa (experiments 1-3)-speaking against the assumption of domain-general control mechanisms. Moreover, experiencing conflict within a semantically ambiguous sentence did not ease the processing of a subsequent ambiguous sentence (experiments 4-6). Implications of these findings will be discussed.

Ralph Ellison's Acoustic Stereoscope: Reading Invisible Man through Günther Anders's Phenomenology of Music

Abstract: This article is a reading of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) in light of Günther Anders's phenomenology of listening (1931) and hypothesized acoustic stereoscope (1949), proposing the latter as a source for the narrator's speculative desire to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong's "(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Bliue" playing simultaneously. Anders's obscure theories and notions about listening offer a way to conceptualize some of the novel's most enigmatic moments, including its descriptions of echo and its notoriously ambiguous final sentence. The article also explores Anders's career, possible social connections to Ellison, as well as Ellison's renewed interest in music in the late 1940s after years of ambivalence following his decision to stop pursuing music as a career. This recovered interest included working for inventor and sound engineer David Sarser. This part-time employment intersects with the philosophical questions and aural metaphors under investigation here, pointing to a different intellectual context for the novel's prologue and epilogue (1951) than for parts of the novel composed in the 1945–48 period.

ANALISIS KESALAHAN SINTAKSIS PADA TEKS PERSUASI KARYA SISWA KELAS VIII SMP NEGERI 40 BANDUNG

The research aims to describe the causes of sentence writing errors in the persuasive text of class VIII SMP Negeri 40 Bandung, examine various forms of sentence writing errors, and attempt to make solutions to reduce sentence writing errors in persuasive texts by class VIII students of SMP Negeri 40 Bandung. The research data analysis technique uses the theory of Miles and Huberman in Sugiyono. The research method uses a qualitative approach. Based on the results of the research, it was found 76 sentence writing errors which included 2 unsubjected sentence errors, 5 unsubjected sentence errors, 16 unsubjected and unpredicated sentence errors, 12 subject doubling errors, 1 error between the predicate and the inserted object, 11 sentence errors that illogical, 9 errors in ambiguous sentences, 1 error in omission of conjunctions, 12 errors in the use of excessive conjunctions, 4 errors in the use of foreign terms, 3 errors in the use of unnecessary question words. Based on the results of interviewing one of the Indonesian language teachers at SMP Negeri 40 Bandung, it was concluded that the cause of errors in writing sentences in the persuasive text of class VIII students at SMP Negeri 40 Bandung, namely students did not understand the material and did not carry out an assessment or examination of the writing of sentences in student work. The solution to reduce sentence writing errors in persuasive texts by class VIII students of SMP Negeri 40 Bandung is to make interesting learning videos and carry out in depth assessments or examinations of sentence writing in students works.

Entrainment to speech prosody influences subsequent sentence comprehension

ABSTRACT Speech processing is subserved by neural oscillations. Through a mechanism termed entrainment, oscillations can maintain speech rhythms beyond speech offset. We here tested whether entrainment affects higher-level language comprehension. We conducted four online experiments on 80 participants each. Our paradigm combined acoustic entrainment to repetitive prosodic contours with subsequent visual presentation of ambiguous target sentences (e.g. “Max sees Tom and Karl laughs”). We aimed to elicit faulty segmentations through the duration of the preceding contour (e.g. the segment “Max sees Tom and Karl” leads to an error at “laughs”). Across experiments, self-paced reading data showed that participants employed the duration of the initial prosodic contour to predict the duration of the upcoming segments. Prosody entrainment may thus serve a predictive function during language comprehension, not only helping the reader to segment the current speech input, but also inducing temporal predictions about upcoming segments.

The uncanniness of written text is explained by configural deviation and not by processing disfluency.

Deviating from human norms in human-looking artificial entities can elicit uncanny sensations, described as the uncanny valley. This study investigates in three tasks whether configural deviation in written text also increases uncanniness. It further evaluates whether the uncanniness of text is better explained by perceptual disfluency and especially deviations from specialized categories, or conceptual disfluency caused by ambiguity. In the first task, lower sentence readability predicted uncanniness, but deviating sentences were more uncanny than typical sentences despite being just as readable. Furthermore, familiarity with a language increased the effect of configural deviation on uncanniness but not the effect of non-configural deviation (blur). In the second and third tasks, semantically ambiguous words and sentences were not uncannier than typical sentences, but deviating, non-ambiguous sentences were. Deviations from categories with specialized processing mechanisms thus better fit the observed results as an explanation of the uncanny valley than ambiguity-based explanations.

Issues on Sentencing of Network Service Providers in Cybercrime

With the continuous progress of science and technology, the problem of conviction and sentencing of network service providers in the field of cybercrime has become increasingly prominent. In judicial practice, there are often different judgments in the same case, ambiguous sentences in the judgment, and ambiguous qualitative nature of the subject of the crime, which shows that the path of conviction and sentencing of network service providers needs to be improved. Through analyzing the current laws and regulations concerning network service providers in China, the lack of classification of network service providers and the application of relevant sentencing laws are the main obstacles to the conviction and sentencing of network service providers. It is suggested to solve the practical obstacles of conviction and sentencing of network service providers by classifying network service providers, limiting the crime of helping information network crimes, strictly controlling the information network security management obligations of network service providers, and perfecting the relevant legal provisions on the obligations of network service providers.

Are control processes domain-general? A replication of 'To adapt or not to adapt? The question of domain-general cognitive control' (Kan et al. 2013).

Conflict and conflict adaptation are well-studied phenomena in experimental psychology. Standard tasks investigating causes and outcomes of conflict during information processing include the Stroop, the Flanker and the Simon task. Interestingly, recent research efforts have moved toward investigating whether conflict in one task domain influences information processing in another task domain, typically referred to as cross-task conflict adaptation. These transfer effects are of central importance for theories about our cognitive architecture, as they are interpreted as pointing towards domain-general cognitive mechanisms. Given the importance of these cross-task transfer effects, the current paper targets at replicating one of the key findings. Specifically, Kan et al. (Kan et al. 2013 Cognition 129, 637–651) showed that reading syntactically ambiguous sentences result in processing adjustments in subsequent Stroop trials. This result is in line with the idea that conflict monitoring works in a domain overarching manner. The present paper presents two replication studies: (i) exact replication: identical sentence-reading task intermixed with stimulus-based Stroop task and (ii) conceptual replication: identical sentence-reading task intermixed with response-based Stroop task. Power calculations were based on the original paper. Both experiments were pre-registered. Despite the experiments being closely designed according to the original study, there was no evidence supporting the hypothesis regarding cross-domain conflict adaptation.

Is sentence ambiguity comprehension affected after mild traumatic brain injury? Results suggest cognitive control is more important than diagnosis.

Individuals with mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) may experience chronic cognitive-linguistic impairments that are difficult to evaluate with existing measures. Garden path sentences are linguistically complex sentences that lead readers down a path to an incorrect interpretation. Previous research indicates many individuals, with or without mTBI, may have difficulty fully resolving the ambiguity of garden path sentences, a skill which may require cognitive control. Evidence suggests cognitive control can be impacted by mTBI. Thus, impairments in cognitive control are expected to correlate with interpreting ambiguous sentences. To examine the relationship between cognitive control and the processing of ambiguous garden path sentences in adults with mTBI. We predict individuals with mTBI will perform more poorly on ambiguous sentence tasks compared with a control group. Further, we predict that performance on this task will correlate with measures of cognitive control and working memory. A total of 20 adults with mTBI history and 44 adults with no significant neurological history were recruited from the community. Participants completed a computerized, ambiguous sentence measure with carefully designed comprehension questions and an abbreviated neuropsychological battery of cognitive-linguistic tasks. Participants performed similarly on sentence ambiguity resolution measures across groups with a wide range in performance. A comprehension measure aimed at identifying full ambiguity resolution correlated with cognitive control across groups. A link between cognitive control and linguistic ambiguity is confirmed in a comprehension measure by the current findings. mTBI history did not appear to change the nature of the relationship between cognitive control and ambiguity resolution. High individual variability on sentence and cognitive control measures across groups suggest that if an impairment were present, it would affect both types of tasks. Thus, testing cognitive communication following mTBI should specifically examine complex cognitive and linguistic processing. What is already known on the subject Cognitive control and ambiguous sentence processing are known to be linked, but the circumstances and individual variability associated with when cognitive control is recruited to support sentence processing are not fully understood. Very little is known about sentence processing following TBI history, despite cognitive control commonly being impaired following mild TBI. Thus, our study was necessary to explore the theoretical and clinical relationships between cognitive control and ambiguous sentence processing in individuals with mild TBI history. What this paper adds to existing knowledge This study adds to our understanding of how cognitive control and ambiguous sentence processing are linked in those with mild TBI history, and similar to the few previous studies, there were no group differences in cognitive or sentence measures. The positive correlation between cognitive control on Stroop and a particular ambiguous sentence comprehension question targeting inhibitory control highlights that any relationship between abilities or assessment tasks must be very specific to tasks with overlapping requirements, such as inhibition. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? The relationship between cognitive and ambiguous sentence measures highlights the need to assess all areas of cognition and communication in those with mild TBI history without assuming that impairments in cognitive performance will relate to communication. The overlap between abilities is highly specific and must be explored on a case-by-case basis in those with mild TBI. Evaluation and treatment should still be individualized based on the functional communication profile of the client.

The processing of ambiguous pronominal reference is sensitive to depth of processing

Previous studies on the processing of ambiguous pronominal reference have led to contradictory results: some suggested that ambiguity may hinder processing (Stewart, Holler, & Kidd, 2007), while others showed an ambiguity advantage (Grant, Sloggett, & Dillon, 2020) similar to what has been reported for structural ambiguities. This study provides a conceptual replication of Stewart et al. (2007, Experiment 1), to examine whether the discrepancy in earlier results is caused by the processing depth that participants engage in (cf. Swets, Desmet, Clifton, & Ferreira, 2008). We present the results from a word-by-word self-paced reading experiment with Dutch sentences that contained a personal pronoun in an embedded clause that was either ambiguous or disambiguated through gender features. Depth of processing of the embedded clause was manipulated through offline comprehension questions. The results showed that the difference in reading times for ambiguous versus unambiguous sentences depends on the processing depth: a significant ambiguity penalty was found under deep processing but not under shallow processing. No significant ambiguity advantage was found, regardless of processing depth. This replicates the results in Stewart et al. (2007) using a different methodology and a larger sample size for appropriate statistical power. These findings provide further evidence that ambiguous pronominal reference resolution is a flexible process, such that the way in which ambiguous sentences are processed depends on the depth of processing of the relevant information. Theoretical and methodological implications of these findings are discussed.

Integrating phonological and phonetic aspects of Mandarin Tone 3 sandhi in auditory sentence disambiguation

This study investigates whether Mandarin listeners integrate a prosody-covarying phonological variable, the Chinese Tone 3 sandhi (T3S), into auditory sentence disambiguation. The T3S process changes the first of two consecutive low tones (T3) into a rising tone. It applies obligatorily within a foot and optionally across feet. When T3S is optional, it is more likely to apply to Tone 3 syllables across smaller prosodic boundaries than larger ones; the smaller the boundary, the sharper the T3S pitch rise. Participants listened to twenty-seven structurally ambiguous sentences and identified from two written interpretations the one consistent with what they heard. Each sentence contains two consecutive Tone 3 syllables, and posing different prosodic boundaries between the Tone 3 syllables would result in different interpretations. The first Tone 3 syllable was manipulated into three tone shapes (sharp-rising, shallow-rising, low) and two duration types (long, short). The results show higher major-juncture interpretation rates when the first Tone 3 is long than short, when T3S does not apply than when it applies, and when T3S has a shallower than sharper pitch slope. The tone effect further interacts with the foot formation of Tone 3 syllables in each sentence. We propose that listeners have sophisticated knowledge of prosodic variables and use it efficiently in linguistically meaningful contexts.

Contextual Semantic-Guided Entity-Centric GCN for Relation Extraction

Relation extraction tasks aim to predict potential relations between entities in a target sentence. As entity mentions have ambiguity in sentences, some important contextual information can guide the semantic representation of entity mentions to improve the accuracy of relation extraction. However, most existing relation extraction models ignore the semantic guidance of contextual information to entity mentions and treat entity mentions in and the textual context of a sentence equally. This results in low-accuracy relation extractions. To address this problem, we propose a contextual semantic-guided entity-centric graph convolutional network (CEGCN) model that enables entity mentions to obtain semantic-guided contextual information for more accurate relational representations. This model develops a self-attention enhanced neural network to concentrate on the importance and relevance of different words to obtain semantic-guided contextual information. Then, we employ a dependency tree with entities as global nodes and add virtual edges to construct an entity-centric logical adjacency matrix (ELAM). This matrix can enable entities to aggregate the semantic-guided contextual information with a one-layer GCN calculation. The experimental results on the TACRED and SemEval-2010 Task 8 datasets show that our model can efficiently use semantic-guided contextual information to enrich semantic entity representations and outperform previous models.

Korean-Speaking L2 Learners’ Understanding of Ambiguous Sentences with the Preverbal Also

A sentence containing preverbal also (i.e., Mary also ate a cookie) causes semantic ambiguity since the focus is assigned to a subject NP or an object NP. Depending on which constituent is identified as focus, the sentence evokes a different presupposition in discourse contexts. The current study examined which interpretation Korean EFL learners prefer to have in the comprehension of preverbal also-sentences with ambiguous focus and how it can differ in terms of their English proficiency. In a revised picture truth value judgment task, participants were asked to read a target sentence and then view a picture that described a presuppositional event. They were asked to check whether the target sentence is compatible with the depicted situation. The results showed that low and intermediate proficiency groups favored an object-focused interpretation whereas groups of high proficiency and English native speakers were able to assign the focus to a subject NP and an object NP by making use of relevant presuppositions from picture contexts.

Kesalahan Berbahasa pada Aspek Ejaan, Diksi, Imbuhan, dan Struktur Kalimat dalam Karangan Cerita Pendek Siswa

This study aims to determine the types and patterns of errors that occur in short story writing in trilingual students of grade VII at Tzu Chi International School, so that the types and patterns of language errors can be used as guidelines in compiling teaching materials for short story writing in an international schools (SPK). The method in this study is a qualitative descriptive method. The source of the data for this research is a short story that written by grade VII Tzu Chi International School students. The results obtained from 32 samples there were 316 errors consisting of errors in spelling, diction, affixes, and sentence structure aspects. The most language errors were in the spelling aspect, totally 114 errors (36%) including errors in writing capital letters, writing pronouns, writing prepositions, writing acronyms, rewriting words, writing numbers, using absorption words, and using punctuation marks, then errors on the diction aspect, there are 85 errors (26.8 %), including errors in finding the appropriate form (suitable) with the situation and the sense of Bahasa Indonesia native speakers. Errors in the affix aspect 80 errors (25.3%), which included errors in the omission of the affix field and in the word formation, errors in sounds that should have melted, but were not melted, errors in the yielding of sounds that should not have melted, replacement and shortening of morphs, and the use of inappropriate affixes and errors in the aspect of sentence structure as many as 37 errors (11.7%) including excessive wording and use of elements, unsubjected sentence errors, unpredicated sentences, and ambiguous sentences. Keywords: Language errors, diction aspect, spelling aspect, affix aspect, sentence structure aspect and ability to write short stories

Juncture prosody across languages: Similar production but dissimilar perception

How do speakers of languages with different intonation systems produce and perceive prosodic junctures in sentences with identical structural ambiguity? Native speakers of English and of Mandarin produced potentially ambiguous sentences with a prosodic juncture either earlier in the utterance (e.g., “He gave her # dog biscuits,” “他给她#狗饼干 ”), or later (e.g., “He gave her dog # biscuits,” “他给她狗 #饼干 ”). These productiondata showed that prosodic disambiguation is realised very similarly in the two languages, despite some differences in the degree to which individual juncture cues (e.g., pausing) were favoured. In perception experiments with a new disambiguation task, requiring speeded responses to select the correct meaning for structurally ambiguous sentences, language differences in disambiguation response time appeared: Mandarin speakers correctly disambiguated sentences with earlier juncture faster than those with later juncture, while English speakers showed the reverse. Mandarin-speakers with L2 English did not show their native-language response time pattern when they heard the English ambiguous sentences. Thus even with identical structural ambiguity and identically cued production, prosodic juncture perception across languages can differ.

Absence of evidence for underspecification in prenominal relative clause attachment

ABSTRACT Relative clauses with ambiguous attachment are sometimes processed faster than their unambiguous counterparts. Two broad classes of theories account for this phenomenon: Race-based models posit that ambiguous sentences are read faster due to a “race” between several permissible analyses of the sentence. In contrast, the strategic underspecification account maintains that, under the right conditions, readers underspecify ambiguities in order to save time. We argue that the two accounts make qualitatively different predictions for structures with pre-nominal relative clauses, such as in Turkish. While the underspecification account predicts an ambiguity advantage in Turkish, race-based accounts predict the absence of such an effect. We present data from two reading experiments in Turkish (N=39 and N=184) in which we find no evidence for a substantial ambiguity advantage in the processing of ambiguous sentences with prenominal relative clauses and argue that this finding poses a major challenge for the strategic underspecification account.

A structural ambiguity analysis in sentences found in the skeleton key novel

As social beings, humans need other individual to survive. In social life, humans interact and communicate with each other using languages which use to ask for help or exchange information. Often in verbal or non-verbal communication, someone provides information that has two or more different meaning thus confusing the interlocutors, this condition of information call ambiguous. This study entitle “A Structural Ambiguity Analysis In Sentences Found in The Skeleton Key Novel” is aimed to identify one of the types of surface ambiguity in the structural ambiguity in sentences found in The Skeleton Key novel, and to analyze pattern of structural ambiguity in sentences that were found in The Skeleton Key novel by tree diagrams. The data of this study were analyzed by using the qualitative method. From 12 data that were found in the data source, one of the data were analyzed as the sample of this study. From six types of surface ambiguity propose by Kriedler (1998) only one of the types was analyzed for this research. It was a coordinate head with one modifier. In this research, the researcher found that the structure of sentence structure will affect the meaning of the sentence itself. Thus the analysis of sentence structure using tree diagram will produce different meaning according to intented construction in tree diagram.

On the prosody of French ambiguous multiple negative sentences.

While it has long been assumed that prosody can help resolve syntactic and semantic ambiguities, empirical evidence has shown that the mapping between prosody and meaning is complex (Hirschberg & Avesani 2000; Jackendoff 1972). This paper investigates the prosody of ambiguous French sentences with multiple potentially negative terms that allow two semantically very distinct interpretations—a single negation reading involving negative concord (NC), and a double negative reading (DN) with a positive meaning reflecting a strictly compositional interpretation— with the goal to further research on the role of prosody in ambiguities by examining whether intonation can be recruited by speakers to signal distinct interpretations of these sentences to hearers. Twenty native speakers produced transitive sentences with potentially negative terms embedded in contexts designed to elicit single-negation or double-negation readings. Analysis regarding the F0 and the duration of the utterances revealed distinct prosodic profiles for the two readings, confirming previous evidence that speakers can produce characteristic acoustic cues to signal intended distinctive meanings (Kraljic & Brennan 2005; Syrett, Simon & Nisula 2014). Our results reveal that the NC readings feature a focused subject and a post-focally more compressed object, in contrast to the DN readings where both the subject and the object were independently focused. They do not relate DN to contradiction but link negative meaning with focus on French negative concord items (NCI). The paper discusses broad implications of these findings for theoretical approaches to NC and outlines further questions for the syntax-prosody interface of these constructions.

Pronominal anaphora resolution in Polish: Investigating online sentence interpretation using eye-tracking.

The mechanism of anaphora resolution is subject to large cross-linguistic differences. The most likely reason for this is the different sensitivity of pronouns to the range of factors that determine their reference. In the current study, we explored the mechanism of anaphora resolution in Polish. First, we explored preferences in the interpretation of null and overt pronouns in ambiguous sentences. More specifically, we investigated whether Polish speakers prefer to relate overt pronouns to subject or object antecedents. Subsequently, we tested the consequences of violating this bias when tracing the online sentence-interpretation process using eye-tracking. Our results show that Polish speakers have a strong preference for interpreting null pronouns as referring to subject antecedents and interpreting overt pronouns as referring to object antecedents. However, in online sentence interpretation, only overt pronouns showed sensitivity to a violation of the speaker's preference for a pronoun-antecedent match. This suggests that null pronoun resolution is more flexible than overt pronoun resolution. Our results indicate that it is much easier for Polish speakers to shift the reference of a null pronoun than an overt one whenever a pronoun is forced to refer to a less-preferred antecedent. These results are supported by naturalness ratings, which showed that null pronouns are considered equally natural regardless of their reference, while overt pronouns referring to subject antecedents are rated as considerably less natural than those referring to object antecedents. To explain this effect, we propose that the interpretation of null and overt pronouns is sensitive to different factors which determine their reference.

A resolução de ambiguidade anafórica em inglês, espanhol e português

ABSTRACT This study aims to determine how (a) ambiguity resolution differs in English, Spanish, and Portuguese; (b) L2 learners are influenced by their L1 regarding ambiguity resolution; and (c) the order of the clauses, (d) the salience of the anaphor, or (e) the choice of verbs may affect this process. A total of 181 people answered an online survey and selected the antecedent of the anaphor for 16 ambiguous sentences. The Position of Antecedent Strategy was tested for the three languages and the conclusion was that it applies to European and Brazilian Portuguese, but not for Spanish or English. While Spanish and English native speakers tend to interpret the subject of the subordinate clause as corresponding to the subject of the main clause, learners are influenced by their L1 and seem uncertain especially on how to resolve pronominal cataphora. Finally, we have concluded that semantics has a great influence on the resolution of ambiguous anaphora in these languages, and we suggest that it should be taken in consideration during the design of a study like this one.

Prosodic cue weighting in the processing of ambiguous sentences by native English listeners and Korean listeners of English.

Differences in the perception of segmental contrasts by native and non-native listeners have been analyzed as the results of language-specific weightings of acoustic cues in their perception grammar [e.g., Escudero and Boersma, Stud. Second Lang. Acquis. 26, 551-585 (2004)]. However, less attention has been paid to the weighting of prosodic cues. This study investigated the relative importance of four prosodic cues-word duration, pauses, pitch, and intensity-in the resolution of English syntactic ambiguity by native English listeners and Korean learners of English. In a forced-choice processing task, English listeners' disambiguation relied most heavily on pitch, followed by pause and intensity cues, whereas pauses were the only heavily weighted cue for Korean listeners, indicating an influence from their native language. Moreover, Korean listeners' use of prosody for disambiguation was found to be influenced by their age of English acquisition and English proficiency.