Invited Speakers

Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim

Meaning and grammar in a parallel architecture for language processing

In this talk I will introduce a novel cognitive and computational architecture for human language processing. The architecture features parallel streams for meaning and grammar, drawing from a shared mental lexicon and contributing concurrently to incremental updates of a discourse model. Intermediate representations are generated independently within each stream, resulting in a range of possible interactions between meaning and grammar — from dominance and redundancy to competition and conflict. I will discuss linguistic phenomena illustrating these different interactions and present experimental results corroborating the architecture’s processing consequences. I will then describe a computational model that aligns with experimental results and that demonstrates the importance of intermediate representations. I will conclude with some considerations on how the theory reconciles two key principles in linguistics — compositionality and context — and the traditions that build on them.