Sentence Comprehension as a Cognitive Process

Sentence comprehension - the way we process and understand spoken and written language - is a central and important area of research within psycholinguistics. This book explores the contribution of computational linguistics to the field, showing how computational models of sentence processing can help scientists in their investigation of human cognitive processes. It presents the leading computational model of retrieval processes in sentence processing, the Lewis and Vasishth cue-based retrieval mode, and develops a principled methodology for parameter estimation and model comparison/evaluation using benchmark data, to enable researchers to test their own models of retrieval against the present model. It also provides readers with an overview of the last 20 years of research on the topic of retrieval processes in sentence comprehension, along with source code that allows researchers to extend the model and carry out new research. Comprehensive in its scope, this book is essential reading for researchers in cognitive science.

Shravan Vasishth is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Potsdam. He is also a chartered statistician (Royal Statistical Society).

Felix Engelmann is co-founder and data scientist at the business analytics company, startupdetector. His published research applies diverse computational methods to the modelling of human language processing and language acquisition.