About Edible Restaurants: Conflicts between Syntax and Semantics as Revealed by ERPs.

In order to investigate conflicts between semantics and syntax, we recorded ERPs, while participants read Dutch sentences. Sentences containing conflicts between syntax and semantics (Fred eats in asandwich…/Fred eats arestaurant…) elicited an N400. These results show that conflicts between syntax and semantics not necessarily lead to P600 effects and are in line with the processing competition account.

The Unification Space implemented as a localist neural net: predictions and error-tolerance in a constraint-based parser.

We introduce a novel computer implementation of the Unification-Space parser (Vosse and Kempen in Cognition 75:105-143, 2000) in the form of a localist neural network whose dynamics is based on interactive activation and inhibition. The wiring of the network is determined by Performance Grammar (Kempen and Harbusch in Verb constructions in German and Dutch. Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2003), a lexicalist formalism with feature unification as binding operation.

Retrieval and unification of syntactic structure in sentence comprehension: an FMRI study using word-category ambiguity.

Sentence comprehension requires the retrieval of single word information from long-term memory, and the integration of this information into multiword representations. The current functional magnetic resonance imaging study explored the hypothesis that the left posterior temporal gyrus supports the retrieval of lexical-syntactic information, whereas left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) contributes to syntactic unification. Twenty-eight subjects read sentences and word sequences containing word-category (noun-verb) ambiguous words at critical positions.

In defense of competition during syntactic ambiguity resolution.

In a recent series of publications (Traxler et al. J Mem Lang 39:558-592, 1998; Van Gompel et al. J Mem Lang 52:284-307, 2005; see also Van Gompel et al.