Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

not provide such an output. In the sentence (6) it would just group [powerful means and
instruments] together.
In computational linguistics shallow parsers are viewed as an alternative to full-sentence
parsing, an alternative with some practical advantages. Performing only partial syntactic
analysis of the sentence can be useful in many large-scale language processing
applications such as text summarization. When the concept of shallow parsing was
conceived, learning methods were used to recognize patterns in sentences (Ramshaw &
Marcus, 1995). The idea of pattern recognition is suitable for applications using neural
networks and this makes it interesting for language comprehension modeling.
Apart from applications in computational linguistics, psycholinguistic evidence for
shallow parsing is available, as well (Sanford & Sturt, 2002). The evidence includes
underspecifications (Reyle, 1993) as in the following three sentences:
(7) Alice showed all her cameras to a technician.
(8) The technician worked in a big store.
(9) The technicians worked in a big store.
Given the two possibilities, that there is only one technician and that there are more of
them, there should be a difference in reading times between the pairs and showing preference for one possible interpretation. However, no such difference is
observed (Sanford & Sturt, 2002: 383) suggesting that a phrase a technician is
underspecified in (7). Other psycholinguistic evidence include lack of error detection
(and providing wrong answers) in sentences such as
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