ERIC Number: EJ747035
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2005
Pages: 49
Abstractor: Author
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0364-0213
EISSN: N/A
A Memory-Based Theory of Verbal Cognition
Dennis, Simon
Cognitive Science, v29 n2 p145-193 2005
The syntagmatic paradigmatic model is a distributed, memory-based account of verbal processing. Built on a Bayesian interpretation of string edit theory, it characterizes the control of verbal cognition as the retrieval of sets of syntagmatic and paradigmatic constraints from sequential and relational long-term memory and the resolution of these constraints in working memory. Lexical information is extracted directly from text using a version of the expectation maximization algorithm. In this article, the model is described and then illustrated on a number of phenomena, including sentence processing, semantic categorization and rating, short-term serial recall, and analogical and logical inference. Subsequently, the model is used to answer questions about a corpus of tennis news articles taken from the Internet. The model's success demonstrates that it is possible to extract propositional information from naturally occurring text without employing a grammar, defining a set of heuristics, or specifying a priori a set of semantic roles.
Descriptors: Memory, Language Processing, Semantics, Sentence Structure, Serial Learning, Heuristics, Inferences, Psychometrics, Long Term Memory, Short Term Memory, Program Descriptions, Program Validation, Verbal Learning
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. 10 Industrial Avenue, Mahwah, NJ 07430. Tel: 800-926-6579; Tel: 201-258-2200; Fax: 201-236-0072; e-mail: journals@erlbaum.com; Web site: https://www.erlbaum.com
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A