Syntactic Distance Research Articles

Sentence processing selectivity in Broca's area: evident for structure but not syntactic movement

The role of Broca’s area in sentence processing is hotly debated. Hypotheses include that Broca’s area supports sentence comprehension via syntax-specific processes, hierarchical structure building, or working memory. Here we adopt a within-subject functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) approach using sentence-level contrasts and non-sentential comparison tasks to address these hypotheses. Standard syntactic movement distance effects were replicated, but no difference was found between movement and non-movement sentences in Broca's area in the group or consistently in the individual subject analyses. Group and individual results both identify Broca's area subregions that are selective for sentence structure. Group, but not individual subject results, suggest shared resources for sentence processing and articulation in Broca's area. We conclude that Broca’s area is not selectively processing syntactic movement, but that subregions are selectively responsive to sentence structure. Our findings reinforce Fedorenko and Kanwishser's call for individual subject analyses in Broca's area, as group findings can obscure selective responses.

Can familiarity lessen the effect of locality? A case study of Mandarin Chinese subjects and the following adverbials

AbstractThis paper explores the relation between familiarity of Chinese subjects and the syntactic distance. We propose two hypotheses: (1) contextually given Mandarin Chinese subjects are more likely to be used with long intervening adverbials than contextually new subjects; and (2) subjects with higher word frequency are more likely to be followed by long adverbials than those with lower word frequency. The data from two Mandarin Chinese treebanks provide supportive evidence for the first hypothesis, but not the second. Cognitively, this is probably due to the possibility that contextual givenness, which reflects familiarity, may lessen the effect of locality by increasing the activation level (the accessibility) of the subject and rendering these subjects less susceptible to the memory decay caused by the adverbials intervening between them and the predicate verbs. Subjects are usually the starting point of a sentence, which has a default given–new information structure. Therefore, when organizing a sentence, we are dominantly concerned with the information status (contextual givenness) relative to previous context when choosing the subjects, which may partly accounts for the observed irrelevance between word frequency and the use of adverbials. A sentence is structured based on the information status of the subjects, not their word frequency.

Landmark-Based Plan Distance Measures for Diverse Planning

Prior approaches to generating diverse plans in domain-independent planning seek out variations on plan structure such as actions or causal links used, or states entered. Measuring such syntactic differences between plans can be misleading because syntactically different plans can be semantically identical. We develop a landmark-based plan distance measure that captures semantic differences between plans.The landmark-based distance measure focuses on the disjunctive landmarks satisfied by each plan. We develop a simple algorithm for finding diverse plans that is based upon the LAMA planner. We illustrate that, in comparison with plan distance measures, landmark-based plan distance is not as susceptible to including irrelevant or redundant actions in plans to increase plan distance. Through extensive empirical evaluation, we find that high landmark distance between plans implies high action set distance, but not vice versa. Landmark-based plan distance overcomes some of the weaknesses of syntactic plan distance measures and can be used to find plan sets that are both landmark diverse and action set diverse.

Measuring Syntactic Distances between Dialects: A Web Application for Annotating Dialectal Data

Research in dialectal variation allows linguists to understand the fundamental principles that underlie language systems and gram- matical changes in time and space. Since different dialectal variants do not occur randomly on the territory and geographical patterns of variation are recognizable for an individual syntactic form, we believe that a systematic approach for studying these variations is required. In this paper, we present a Web application for annotating dialectal data; the annotated data will be adopted for investigating measures of the degree of syntactic differences between dialects.

Fair digital signing: The structural reliability of signed documents

The exchange of digitally signed data inherits all the problems related to the indeterminacy of human communication, which are further intensified by the legal implications of signing. One of the fundamental intrinsic weaknesses of digital signatures is that the signer creates a signature on a series of bits, which may be differently transformed and perceived by the verifier (or relying party), due to the inevitable differences in the intention and the purpose of the two agents. As a result, syntactic and semantic distance is introduced between a signer and a relying party. In this paper we suggest a framework that models the process of digital signing, using several virtual and interrelated levels of communication, thereby promoting the analytic and synthetic exploration of the entities and the transformations involved. Based on this exploration, it is possible to indicate the favorable conditions for mutual understanding between the signer and the relying party. We focus on the syntactic and presentation levels of the communication process and we introduce the notion of structural reliability of a syntactic component, as a measure of how securely and accurately a signed document can be used. It is argued that structural reliability depends on a quantitative metric, such as the structural informativeness along with other qualitative characteristics of the syntactic component. The structural reliability of several document representation protocols is evaluated and it is concluded that the higher the informativeness of the protocol, the less the semantic distance produced, provided that the communicating parties have the capacity to handle this protocol.

Can late L2 learners acquire new grammatical features? Evidence from ERPs and eye-tracking

We report a series of ERP and eye-tracking experiments investigating, (a) whether English–French learners can process grammatical gender online, (b) whether cross-linguistic similarities influence this ability, and (c) whether the syntactic distance between elements affects agreement processing. To address these questions we visually presented sentences which were either grammatically correct or contained noun–adjective gender agreement violations. In response to violations between the noun and a post-posed adjective (the canonical structure in French), both groups revealed a P600 effect. In contrast, violations between the noun and a pre-posed adjective (a less frequent order) triggered a P600 in French speakers but an N400 in L2 learners (implying that learners have not yet fully acquired native-like processing for pre-posed adjectives). Violations between the noun and the predicative adjective showed different effects for the native (P600) and non-native (no effect) groups with ERPs, but a similar pattern with eye-tracking. Overall, these results suggest that late L2 learners can acquire and process new features.

Long-Range Comparison between Genes and Languages Based on Syntactic Distances

Objective: To propose a new approach for comparing genetic and linguistic diversity in populations belonging to distantly related groups. Background: Comparisons of linguistic and genetic differences have proved powerful tools to reconstruct human demographic history. Current models assume on both sides that similarities reflect either descent from common ancestry or the balance between isolation and contact. Most linguistic phylogenies are ultimately based on lexical evidence (roughly, words and morphemes with their sounds and meanings). However, measures of lexical divergence are reliable only for closely related languages, thus large-scale comparisons of genetic and linguistic diversity have appeared problematic so far. Methods: Syntax (abstract rules to combine words into sentences) appears more measurable, universally comparable, and stable than the lexicon, and hence certain syntactic similarities might reflect deeper linguistic relationships, such as those between distant language families. In this study, we for the first time compared genetic data to a matrix of syntactic differences among selected populations of three continents. Results: Comparing two databases of microsatellite (Short Tandem Repeat) markers and Single Nucleotides Polymorphisms (SNPs), with a linguistic matrix based on the values of 62 grammatical parameters, we show that there is indeed a correlation of syntactic and genetic distances. We also identified a few outliers and suggest a possible interpretation of the overall pattern. Conclusions: These results strongly support the possibility of better investigating population history by combining genetic data with linguistic information of a new type, provided by a theoretically more sophisticated method to assess the relationships between distantly related languages and language families.

Revising threshold functions

A revision algorithm is a learning algorithm that identifies the target concept, starting from an initial concept. Such an algorithm is considered efficient if its complexity (in terms of the resource one is interested in) is polynomial in the syntactic distance between the initial and the target concept, but only polylogarithmic in the number of variables in the universe. We give an efficient revision algorithm in the model of learning with equivalence and membership queries for threshold functions, and some negative results showing, for instance, that threshold functions cannot be revised efficiently from either type of query alone. The algorithms work in a general revision model where both deletion and addition type revision operators are allowed.

Effect of syntactic similarity on cortical activation during second language processing: A comparison of English and Japanese among native Korean trilinguals

In this study of native Korean trilinguals we examined the effect of syntactic similarity between first (L1) and second (L2) languages on cortical activation during the processing of Japanese and English, which are, respectively, very similar to and different from Korean. Subjects had equivalent proficiency in Japanese and English. They performed auditory sentence comprehension tasks in Korean, Japanese, and English during functional MRI (fMRI). The bilateral superior temporal cortex was activated during the comprehension of three languages. The pars triangularis of the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) was additionally activated for L2 processing. Furthermore, the right cerebellum, the pars opercularis of the left IFG, and the posteriomedial part of the superior frontal gyrus were activated during the English tasks only. We observed significantly greater activation in the pars opercularis of the left IFG, the right cerebellum, and the right superior temporal cortex during the English than Japanese task; activation in these regions did not differ significantly between Korean and Japanese. Differential activation of the pars opercularis of the left IFG and the right cerebellum likely reflects syntactic distance and differential activation in the right superior temporal cortex may reflect the prosodic distance between English from Korean and Japanese. Furthermore, in the pars oparcularis of the left IFG and the right cerebellum, significant negative correlation between the activation and duration of exposure was observed for English, but not for Japanese. Our research supports the notion that linguistic similarity between L1 and L2 affects the cortical processing of second language.

Measuring Syntactic Variation in Dutch Dialects

This research applies dialectometric methods to purely syntactic dialect data. It will be shown that there is geographic cohesion in syntactic variation when viewed in the aggregate. The amount of syntactic variation which can be accounted for by geography will be determined. Dialectometric techniques will be used to develop an additive measure of syntactic differences. Multidimensional scaling will be applied to visualise the geographic distribution of the Dutch dialects with respect to syntactic variation in the aggregate. The Dutch dialect map based on a syntactic measure will be compared with a dialect map based on subjective judgements and a dialect map based on pronunciation differences to put the syntactic measurement results into perspective. An alternative way to measure syntactic distance will be presented and will provide indications for future research to more accurately quantify syntactic variation.

Motion-based video retrieval by trajectory matching

This paper proposes a hybrid motion-based video retrieval system to retrieve desired videos from video databases through trajectory matching. The hybrid method includes a sketch-based scheme and a string-based one to analyze and index a trajectory with more syntactic meanings. First of all, this method uses a sampling technique to extract a set of control points from each trajectory as features. Then, the sketch-based method uses a curve fitting technique to interpolate some missed data in this set of control points. Then, the visual distance between any two trajectories can be directly measured by comparing their position data. The visual distance is good in solving the problem of translation-invariant trajectory matching but poor in solving the problem of partial trajectory matching. Therefore, in addition to the visual distance, the hybrid method uses the string-based scheme to compare any two trajectories according to their syntactic meanings. With the help of the syntactic distance, many impossible candidates can be filtered out in advance and thus the accuracy of video retrieval can be much enhanced. In addition, the problem of partial trajectory matching will become easy to be solved. Thus, even though a partial trajectory is queried, all desired video clips still can be very accurately retrieved. Experimental results have proved the superiority of our proposed method.

New Horn Revision Algorithms

A revision algorithm is a learning algorithm that identifies the target concept, starting from an initial concept. Such an algorithm is considered efficient if its complexity (in terms of the measured resource) is polynomial in the syntactic distance between the initial and the target concept, but only polylogarithmic in the number of variables in the universe. We give efficient revision algorithms in the model of learning with equivalence and membership queries. The algorithms work in a general revision model where both deletion and addition revision operators are allowed. In this model one of the main open problems is the efficient revision of Horn formulas. Two revision algorithms are presented for special cases of this problem: for depth-1 acyclic Horn formulas, and for definite Horn formulas with unique heads.

Subject-Verb Agreement in Children and Adults: Serial or Hierarchical Processing?

Two processes, serial and hierarchical, are generally opposed to account for grammatical encoding in language production. In a developmental perspective, the question addressed here is whether the subject-verb agreement during writing is computed serially, once the words are linearly ordered in the sentence, or hierarchically, as soon as the number features are determined in a hierarchical frame. Adults and children from 3rd to 5th grades were requested to listen to sentences with built-in prepositional phrases or relative clauses and to transcribe them as quickly as possible. A serial hypothesis assumes that subject-verb agreement errors should be equally frequent with both preambles because each has the same length separating the subject head noun and the main verb. Conversely, according to a hierarchical view, errors should be more frequent with a prepositional phrase because the syntactic distance between the subject and the verb is greater than with a relative clause. The results revealed a main effect of the preamble manipulated in 5th graders and adults, but not in 3rd graders. These data were in favor of a hierarchical processing in older writers and a serial one in younger children. However, in 3rd grade, we assumed that the potential serial account was a result of the resource constraint on writing more than of a real serial processing of the agreement.

Topological aspects of numberings

AbstractWe investigate connections between the syntactic and semantic distance of programs on an abstract, recursion theoretic level. For a certain rather restrictive notion of interdependency of the two kinds of distances, there remain only few and “unnatural” numberings allowing such close relationship. Weakening the requirements leads to the discovery of universal metrics such that for an arbitrary recursively enumerable family of functions a numbering compatible with such a metric can uniformly be constructed. We conclude our considerations with some implications on learning theory.

Subject-verb agreement errors in French and English: The role of syntactic hierarchy

We report two parallel experiments conducted in French and in English in which we induced subject-verb agreement errors to explore the role of syntactic structure during sentence production. Previous studies have shown that attraction errors (i.e., a tendency of the verb to agree with an immediately preceding noun instead of with the subject of the sentence) occur when a preverbal local noun disagrees in number with the subject head noun. The attraction effect was accounted for either by the proximity of the local noun to the verb in the linearised sentence (linear distance hypothesis) or by the processing simultaneity of the head and local nouns situated in the same clause (clause packaging hypothesis). In the current experiments, speakers were asked to complete complex sentential preambles. Contrary to the predictions of these two hypotheses, we found that agreement errors were more frequent following an intermediate modifier (e.g., *The threat-S to the presidents-P of the company-S ARE serious) than an immediately preverbal modifier (e.g., *The threat-S to the president-S of the companies-P ARE serious). It is suggested that attraction is determined by the syntactic distance between the interfering noun and the head noun at a stage of the grammatical encoding of the sentence during which syntactic units are organised into a hierarchical structure.

High-frequency sequence stratigraphy using syntactic methods and clustering applied to the upper limestone coal group (Pendleian, E1) of the Kincardine Basin, United Kingdom

We define a distance between sedimentary successions to compare their dissimilarity formally. Distance definition is based on attributed syntactic representation. One-dimensional successions can be represented by a string of lithofacies symbols sequentially or vertically. Each symbol can also have a vector of attributes that can provide other information on lithofacies such as thickness. The distance of any two successions is then defined consisting of its syntactic and attribute subdistances. Syntactic distance measures difference of vertical lithofacies change between two successions and attribute distance measures difference of thickness of corresponding lithofacies. Clustering is used to test validity of distance definition and its potential application to analysis of cycle-dominated sedimentary successions. Example is from the Namurian-A succession in Kincardine basin, central Scotland. There are 56 cycles in intervals of about 300 m each in two boreholes. Recognition of intermediate cycles depends on correctly determining of types of these short cycles and their vertical stacking pattern. Intermediate cycles have better potential in high-resolution stratal correlation regionally. Syntactic clustering results show that 56 short cycles can be classified into four groups with distinctive geological interpretation, which further helps reveal hierarchical cyclic architecture of the whole succession.

Effects of clausal structure on subject-verb agreement errors.

This paper explores the effect of manipulating the internal structure of a complex subject on the incidence of subject--verb agreement errors. Using the sentence completion task (Bock & Miller, 1991), this study followed up on Vigliocco and Nicol's (1995) finding that the syntactic distance between a head noun and a number-mismatching noun contained within a modifier has an impact on error incidence: the greater the distance, the lower the error rate. The study presented in this paper investigated whether this distance effect is purely syntactic; if so, then it would be expected that there would be fewer errors following The owner of the house which charmed the realtors... than following The owner of the house who charmed the realtors..., since in the latter, the mismatch is syntactically nearer the head noun. Results show no hint of a difference between the two, suggesting that the distance effect is more likely due to temporal distance rather than syntactic distance per se.

The agreement hierarchy

Consideration of the problem of alternative agreement forms (§ 1) leads us to postulate a hierarchy of agreement positions (§ 2) which allows us to make predictions as to the possibility and relative frequency of semantic as compared to syntactic agreement. The hierarchy is justified by data from a variety of languages which permit alternative agreements (§ 3). Confirming evidence comes from a study of the instances where agreement in case and person is required in different languages (§ 4). The status of the hierarchy and the type of prediction it makes are discussed. It is suggested that the hierarchy determines the main divisions of a measure called SYNTACTIC DISTANCE and that other factors (word order, distance between controller and agreeing element, depth of stacking) determine relative degrees of distance within these main divisions (§ 5). The basic claim of the paper is that as syntactic distance increases so does the likelihood of semantic agreement.