Dynamic Syntax as a Neuro-Cognitive Model of Human Parsing

Kei Yoshimoto (Tohoku University)

Recent developments in non-invasive measurement of brain activities have paved the way for directly observing how linguistic information is processed in the human braiin. However, no attempts have hitherto been made to model human sentence comprehension based on the data provided by those methods from a unified formal point of view. This paper proposes a parser which behaves in a similar manner to humans in eliciting different event-related potentials (ERPs) depending on whether NPs are unambiguously case marked or not. The electroencephalographical data are based on German subordinate clauses and Japanese sentences. The crucial role therein is performed by syntactic underspecification in incremental processing, which is made possible by Dynamic Syntax (Kempson et al. 2001) adopted as our formal linguistic theory. We extend the original Dynamic Syntax formalism by adding default specifications, whose overwriting in either syntax or semantics corresponds to each characteristic ERP.