Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

itself) is called 'pragmatic normalization' (Fillenbaum, 1974). Similar experiments that
involve participants' misinterpretation of garden-path sentences constructed with
pragmatic or world knowledge interference such as
(15) While Anna dressed the baby spit up on the bed.
(where participants often incorrectly answer that Anna dressed the baby) can be found in
Ferreira et al. (2001).
Psycholinguistic models are useful tools to identify elements to which language processes
can be analyzed (although, of course, various models differ in the identification of
particular elements of these processes). They do not specify brain circuits that carry on
the computations, serially or in parallel. Nor do they say much about the contribution of
other functions to the language function, in the first place memory. However, recently,
new kind of psycholinguistic models emerge: they are based on artificial neural networks.
These models constitute an independent field of research, usually in the field of
computational linguistics. What ever the classification of this research be, models based
on artificial neural networks allow for two other kinds of reasoning about language
processes: first, reasoning about how particular elements can be learned and how they
become organized in a particular way; and second, causal reasoning about “impaired”
processes (e.g. Elman, 1991, Elman et al., 1996, Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986,
Plunkett & Marchman, 1991.).
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