Structure everywhere
This is the name for the mental process of assigning a syntactic structure to a linearly encountered string
Parsing
Truth values (T or F)
This guy thought that your native language determines how you think.
Benjamin Lee Whorf
In this person's classic study, NYC department store employees were prompted to say “fourth floor” to reveal patterns in the pronunciation of postvocalic /r/, a variable linked to sociolinguistic variation
William Labov
A system that can predict the next word from previous words
Language Model (important: can be small or large!)
This theory claims that the parser assembles words into a structure as soon as they are encountered, forcing reanalysis if a newly encountered word is incompatible with the initially assumed structure
Garden path theory
This type of meaning seems unaffected by entailment-canceling operations like negation
presupposition
This type of "gender" distinction is thought to purely be a morphosyntactic property
grammatical gender
This resolution advocated for mother tongue-based education to support learning Standard English for native speakers of AAE
1996 Oakland Resolution
Words in LLMs are represented as high-dimensional vectors known as _______
embeddings
Reflexives (himself, each other, etc.)
This property of conversational implicatures allows them to be explicitly withdrawn or denied without contradiction (e.g. “Some of the students passed, indeed, all of them did.”)
Cancellabiility
Jill de Villiers proposed that mastery of this syntactic structure was a pre-requisite for representing propositional thoughts
sentential complements (i.e. embedding a that-clause)
situational, habitual property vs. intrinsic property
Developmental language disorder (DLD - previously called S(pecific) L(anguage) I(mpairment))
In order for the binding principles (principle A, B and C) to apply, the element in question must be c-commanded by the antecedent inside this
Its "binding domain" = the TP containing the element
What listeners do to remedy the situation if you said, "I had to take my cat to the vet", but they had no idea you had a cat
Presupposition accommodation
5-year-olds pass, but 3-year-olds fail, tests that probe this theory of mind ability
false belief reasoning
syllable-final consonant cluster reduction (e.g. kissed [kɪst] in mainstream English would be pronounced as [kɪs] in AAE bc of cluster reduction)
The addition of this feature distinguishes modern "transformer" models from earlier 'vanilla' RNNs
attention (mechanism for a model to weigh previous words in terms of its importance to the next one)
This parsing phenomenon occurs when a sequence of words permits multiple structural analyses at an intermediate stage of processing, even though the sentence ultimately has only one correct structure.
Temporary or local ambiguity
There are no natural language quantifiers of the form “QUANTIFIER girls smiled” whose truth depends on individuals outside the set of girls (for instance, smilers who are not girls), a generalization is known as this.
Conservativity
spatial relations
A framework for understanding linguistic diversity as different settings along a finite option space for systematic variation
principles and parameters
Given that full language understanding requires reliance on the context, and on speaker intent (e.g., interpreting figurative meaning), recent work suggests that language is distributed across ______.
both hemispheres (language network in the left hemisphere, ToM regions in the right)