Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on Language Processing (review)

In this volume we find a collection of essays dealing with some of the key issues in the field of language processing. The areas of focus are general theories of parsing, the parsing of modifiers, feature processing, and language production.

The first two studies deal with aspects of the general theory of parsing. Janet Dean Fodor and Atsu Inoue look at the principles that define the parser and the attaching preferences in first- and second-pass parsing. After looking at some problematic cases in English and Japanese, they conclude that the parser’s priority is economy of effort and speed of response to the input. Robert Frank and K. Vijay-Shanker look at lowering across languages. They use c-command as a parsing primitive and by doing so can better explain the lowering possibilities and the range of phrases that can be lowered.

The second area of focus is the parsing of modifiers: Papers by Thierry Baccino, Marica De Vincenzi, and Remo Job and by Cheryl Frenck-Mestre and Joel Pynte look at the attachment of relative clauses to complex noun phrases in French and English. Although they differ in the way they account for the differences, these studies show the complexities and difficulties that researchers face when conducting crosslinguistic experiments. Both studies emphasize some of the factors and aspects that should be controlled for when doing crosslinguistic studies. Matthew J. Traxler, Martin J. Pickering, Charles Clifton, Jr., and Roger Van Gompel also study modifier attachment, but they focus on English data only. They look at different parser models and conclude that a model that resolves syntactic ambiguities in parallel seems to be the most appropriate one.

Michael Meng and Markus Bader look at the role of case and agreement features in processes of syntactic ambiguity resolution and garden-path recovery. They look at case ambiguities in German as well as filler-gap ambiguities. They claim that some of the parsing decisions are directly driven by properties of case and agreement features.

As for language production, Holly P. Branigan and Mercè Prat-Sala study how discourse context and salience can affect language production. Maren Heydel and Wayne S. Murray address the topic of sentence level priming, that is, how the production or perception of a given sentence form increases the probability that the speaker will produce another utterance of the same or related form. They claim that the close relationship between the nature of the conceptual representation and the choice of surface leads to repetition of the same structure.

This volume includes a varied array of studies which provide excellent examples of how research on language processing across languages should be conducted. It is definitely of great interest to those who are considering doing research in the field of crosslinguistic language processing since it addresses some of the core issues in the field. The volume includes common areas of research as well as some less usual ones and also suggests directions for future research.