CRITICAL JOURNAL REVIEW

“Unifying Syntactic Theory and Sentence Processing

Difficulty through a Connectionist Minimalist Parser”

Compiled By
Deby Wulan Lestari
English Education 2014 Regular A
2141121002

Introduction to Psycholinguistics
Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Berlin Sibarani, M. Pd

ENGLISH EDUCATION PROGRAM

ENGLISH AND LITERATURE DEPARTMENT
LANGUAGE AND ART FACULTY
STATE UNIVERSITY OF MEDAN
2018
 I. THE IDENTITY OF JOURNAL
 Title
“Unifying Syntactic Theory and Sentence Processing Difficulty through a
Connectionist Minimalist Parser”
 The Name of the Journal : Cognitive Neurodynamics
 Volume : 3
 Year : 1st October 2009
 Number : -
 Number of Page : 20 pages (297-316)
 Author : Sabrina Gerth and Peter beim Graben
 Publisher : Springer Science+Business Media B.V
II. SUMMARY
 Introduction
“Unifying Syntactic Theory and Sentence Processing Difficulty through a
Connectionist Minimalist Parser” is an article compiled by Sabrina Gerth and
Peter beim Graben on 2009. This article consists of 20 pages. This article tells
about such unification for a particular account to syntactic theory: namely a
parser for Stabler’s Minimalist Grammars, in the framework of Smolensky’s
Integrated Connectionist/Symbolic architectures. In simulations, the researchers
demonstrate that the connectionist minimalist parser produces predictions which
mirror global empirical findings from psycholinguistic research. The purpose of
this paper is to present a unified global account for syntactic theory and sentence
processing difficulty in terms of Minimalist Grammars and Integrated
Connectionist/Symbolic architectures.
 Theory
Psycholinguistics assesses difficulties in sentence processing by means of
several quantitative measures. There are global measures such as reading times of
whole sentences or accuracies in grammaticality judgement tasks which provide
metrics for overall language complexity on the one hand (Traxler and
Gernsbacher 2006; Gibson 1998), and online measures such as fixation durations
in eye-tracking experiments or voltage deflections in the event-related brain
potential (ERP) paradigm on the other hand (Traxler and Gernsbacher 2006;
Osterhout et al. 1994; Frisch et al. 2002).
 A universal framework for Dynamic Cognitive Modeling (beim Graben and
Potthast 2009) is offered by Smolensky’s Integrated Connectionist/Symbolic
architectures (ICS) (Smolensky and Legendre 2006a, b; Smolensky 2006). It
allows the explicit construction of neural realizations for highly structured mental
representations by means of filler/role decompositions and tensor product
representations (cf. Mizraji (1989, 1992) for a related approach). Moreover ICS
suggests a dual aspect interpretation: at the macroscopic, symbolic level,
cognitive computations are performed by the complex dynamics of distributed
activation patterns; at the microscopic, connectionis tlevel, these patterns are
generated by deterministic evolution laws governing neural network dynamics
(Smolensky and Legendre 2006a, b; Smolensky 2006; beim Graben and
Atmanspacher 2009).
Following Stabler (1997), Minimalist Grammars (from here on referred to as
MG) consist of a lexicon and structure building operations that are applied to
lexical items and trees resulting from such applications. The items in the lexicon
consist of syntactic and non-syntactic features (e.g. phonological and semantic
features).
 Research Methodology
It is conducted by the descriptive quantitative research design. The researchers
constructed ICS realizations for a minimalist bottom-up parser that processes
sentence example discussed in the psycholinguistic literature. First the materials
will be outlined which reflect two different ambiguities: (1) direct-object versus
complement clause attachment in English and (2) case-ambiguous nominal
phrases in German.
 Result of the Study
 Firstly trajectories in neural activation space are visualized by phase
portraits of the first two principal components (section ‘‘Phase portraits’’)
 Secondly, the global processing measure in section ‘‘Global analysis’’,
the first principal component integrated over time, as explained in section
‘‘Tikhonov–Hebbian learning’’.
 Thirdly, a correlation analysis between the first principal component and
the number of tree nodes in the respective minimalist state descriptions to
 face a possible objection: that the first principal component of the state
space representation might result into mere ‘‘node counting’’.
Although a lot of things have been looked into, this article only claims to
provide a proof of concept of how to integrate particular grammar formalism
within a dynamical system to model empirical phenomena known in
psycholinguistic theory.
III. STRENGTHS
This journal is quite good to be read for the people to know about more about
psycholinguistics. It tells about the unification of theory and sentence processing
difficulty through a connectionist minimalist parser. There is a simulation in it. This
journal is very nice and complete. The data and those kinds of diagrams are so perfect
to figure out the examples. There are also a lot of references in this article.
IV. WEAKNESS
The background and the theories are actually rather complicated for me. The
way the researchers delivered the contents is easy to be understood for some people
who really know about the theory and the high level of English, but for bachelor
students I think that it is difficult enough to be understood. This journal presented in
full systematically. It is suitable for researchers who have advanced but it will be
confusing for the beginners.
V. CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTION
This study actually tries to unify Syntactic Theory and Sentence Processing
Difficulty through a Connectionist Minimalist Parser. It is very good to be read by
who are learning Psycholinguistics. The researchers have pointed out a global
processing measure based on temporally integrated observables that successfully
accounts for sentence processing difficulties. Modeling sentence processing through
the combination of the minimalist grammar formalism and a dynamical system
combines the functionalities of established linguistic theories and further accounts for
the two levels of description of higher cognition in the brain and takes a step into a
new perspective of achieving an abstract representation of language processes.
The writer is inspired to read this thesis because it helps to get the knowledge
and guide us to arrange our own future thesis. The writer suggests paying attention on
bullets and numbering to make it clear. It will be so good if another experiment could
relate the other language rather than only Germany.