A Probabilistic Corpus-based Model of Syntactic Parallelism a Probabilistic Corpus-based Model of Syntactic Parallelism 2

Work in experimental psycholinguistics has shown that the processing of coordinate structures is facilitated when the two conjuncts share the same syntactic structure (Frazier, Munn, & Clifton, 2000). In the present paper, we argue that this parallelism effect is a specific case of the more general phenomenon of syntactic priming—the tendency to repeat recently used syntactic structures. We show that there is a significant tendency for structural repetition in corpora, and that this tendency is not limited to syntactic environments involving coordination, though it is greater in these environments. We present two different implementations of a syntactic priming mechanism in a probabilistic parsing model and test their predictions against experimental data on NP parallelism in English. Based on these results, we argue that a general purpose priming mechanism is preferred over a special mechanism limited to coordination. Finally, we show how notions of activation and decay from ACT-R can be incorporated in the model, enabling it to account for a set of experimental data on sentential parallelism in German. and two anonymous reviewers for comments and feedback on this paper.

实验性心理语言学的工作表明，当两个结构共享相同的句法结构时，准备坐标结构（Frazier，Munn和Clifton，2000年）。句法启动的更普遍的现象 - 重复最近使用的句法结构的趋势，我们表明，在语料库中存在着重要的结构重复的趋势，并且这种趋势不限于涉及的句法环境我们在概率解析模型中提出了两个不同的句法启动机制的实现，并根据这些结果对NP并行的实验数据进行了预测。最终，我们可以在模型中纳入ACT-R的激活和衰减的通知，从而使其能够说明德语中的一组句子平行性的实验数据。纸。