Modularity

1. Modularity What’s the Big Deal?

2. (1983) (not 1983)

3. Impenetrability

4. Impenetrability t T t t (Posner 1978)

5. Properties of Input Modules • Domain Specificity: e.g. color or pitch-sensitive cells, duplex perception • Mandatory Processing of Input • Speed • Impenetrability to Conscious Inspection: phoneme-internal details rapidly lost • Encapsulation: • Shallow Outputs:

6. Encapsulation • “At least some analyzers are encapsulated with respect to at least some sorts of feedback.” (e.g. apparent motion perception)

7. Encapsulation • “…a point of principle: feedback works only to the extent that the information which perception supplies is redundant. […] Feedback is effective only to the extent that, prior to the analysis of the stimulus, the perceiver knows quite a lot about what the stimulus is going to be like.” (p. 67)

8. Encapsulation • “Now, it is a question of considerable theoretical interest whether, and to what extent, predictive analysis plays a role in parsing; but this issue must be sharply distinguished from the question whether the parser is informationally encapsulated. Counterexamples to encapsulation must exhibit the sensitivity of the parser to information that is not specified internal to the language recognition module, and constraints on syntactic well-formedness are paradigms of information that does not satisfy this condition. […] as things stand I know of no convincing evidence that syntactic parsing is ever guided by the subject’s appreciation of semantic context or the ‘real world’ background.” (p. 78)

9. Interaction vs. Autonomy Lexical Access & Sentence Parsing

10. Boland & Cutler (1996)

11. Boland & Cutler 1996 • The debate over interaction/autonomy in lexical access focuses on the generation (activation) stage • There is broad agreement that context affects lexical choices once multiple candidates have been generated

12. Cross-Modal Priming The guests drank vodka, sherry and port at the reception WINE SHIP (Swinney 1979, Seidenberg et al. 1979)

13. Cross-Modal Priming The guests drank vodka, sherry and port at the reception WINE SHIP (Swinney 1979, Seidenberg et al. 1979)

14. Cross-Modal Priming • How could context prevent a contextually unsupported meaning from being accessed?

15. Cross-Modal Priming • Conflicting results over effect of context on multiple access • Tabossi (1998) • The violent hurricane did not damage the ships which were in the port, one of the best equipped along the coast. • Contexts are highly constraining, prime a specific feature of the target meaning.

16. Autonomy vs. Interaction • “In the parsing literature, use of higher-level information to resolve lower-level decisions constitutes interaction, so Multiple Output models are considered interactive because higher-level information is used in the selection process.”(Boland & Cutler, 1996, p. 313)

17. Autonomy vs. Interaction • “In word recognition, in contrast, Multiple Output models are considered clearly autonomous because a process is not considered to be interactive unless higher-level information actually affects the way that alternatives are generated within the system, ruling out certain candidates irrespective of their compatibility with bottom-up information.”(Boland & Cutler, 1996, p. 313)

18. Autonomy vs. Interaction • “This type of autonomy, which has characterized the debate within the domain of word recognition, is also the definition that Fodor (1983) used in his argument for modularity in mental processing: ‘a system [is] autonomous by being encapsulated, by not having access to facts that other systems know about.’ (p. 73)”(Boland & Cutler, 1996, p. 313)

19. Sentence Recognition • Two challenges… • Incremental generation of candidate structures • Selection among competing alternatives (if more than one available) • Early focus on generation problem, how to use grammar • Templates • Ambiguity as test of templates • Shift to focus on ambiguity in its own right

20. Basic Parsing Systems Bottom-up: NP Det N Left-corner: NP Det N Top-down: NP Det N NP Det N some books

21. Bottom-up Parsing Arnold read some books.

22. Bottom-up Parsing NP Arnold Arnold read some books.

23. Bottom-up Parsing NP Arnold V read Arnold read some books.

24. Bottom-up Parsing NP Arnold V read Det some Arnold read some books.

25. Bottom-up Parsing NP Arnold V read Det N some books Arnold read some books.

26. Bottom-up Parsing NP Arnold V NP read Det N some books Arnold read some books.

27. Bottom-up Parsing VP NP Arnold V NP read Det N some books Arnold read some books.

28. Bottom-up Parsing S VP NP Arnold V NP read Det N some books Arnold read some books.

29. Strict bottom-up parsing does not explain incrementality

30. Basic Parsing Systems Bottom-up: NP Det N Left-corner: NP Det N Top-down: NP Det N NP Det N some books

31. Left-Corner Parsing NP Arnold Arnold read some books.

32. Left-Corner Parsing S VP NP Arnold Arnold read some books.

33. Left-Corner Parsing S VP NP Arnold V NP read Arnold read some books.

34. Left-Corner Parsing S VP NP Arnold V NP read Det N some Arnold read some books.

35. Left-Corner Parsing S VP NP Arnold V NP read Det N some books Arnold read some books.

36. Structural ambiguities (to name but a few…) • The horse raced past the barn [… fell] • The man gave the boy the dog […bit a cookie] • The software manufacturers sell nowadays […is overpriced] • Put the frog on the napkin […into the box] • The students knew the answer [… was in the back of the book] • While the farmer was hunting the deer [… ran into the forest]

37. 1970’s accounts of ambiguity resolution (Kimball, Frazier & Fodor) • Generalizations about ambiguity resolution (i.e., selection) result from the nature of the generation process • Search characterized as a ‘race’ - structural simplicity is an emergent property • Minimal Attachment • Late Closure/Right Association • not viewed as principles that govern competition among alternatives • The claims about autonomy are therefore (I think) claims about the generation process

38. The Garden Path Theory • Question: what information is used, and when, to construct syntactic representations? • Focus is on use of different information sources in resolving structurally ambiguous sentences • Claim (e.g. Frazier, 1987): • many different types of information are ultimately used (syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, probabilistic) • but syntactic information is used first/fastest

39. The Garden Path Theory • Argument #1: Strong contextual biases are ineffective (Ferreira & Clifton, 1986)John worked as a reporter for a newspaper. He knew a major story was brewing over the mayor scandal. He went to his editors with a tape and some photos because he needed their approval to go ahead with the story. He ran a tape for one of his editors, and he showed some photos to the other.(a) The editor played the tape agreed the story was big.(b) The editor played the tape and agreed the story was big.The other editor urged John to be cautious.

40. The Garden Path Theory • Argument #2: Strong plausibility biases are ineffective (Ferreira & Clifton, 1986)(a) The defendant examined by the lawyer turned out to be unreliable.(b) The evidence examined by the lawyer turned out to be unreliable.

41. Challenges to Autonomy • (Initial) selection process is governed by non-structural information • Referential support (Crain, Steedman, Altmann) • Semantic plausibility • Lexical/structural frequency • Generation is conditioned by non-structural information e.g., Syntactic vs. semantic anomalies (Kim & Osterhout 2005) The hearty meal was devouring… (P600 ERP response) e.g., Unsupported interpretations (Oakhill & Garnham 1987) e.g., Context supports generation of unambiguous parses in Chinese (Grodner et al., 2005; Hsu, Hurewitz, & Phillips, 2006)

42. (Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Garnsey, 1994)

44. By phrase - cost of ambiguity Animates: 128msInanimates: 29ms (Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Garnsey, 1994)

45. But… (Clifton et al., 2003)

50. Autonomy in Generation