Referential expressions often contain more information than what is strictly necessary for unique identification of the entity the expression refers to. If this extra information slows down the identification process, then this would suggest a violation of one of the Gricean maxims in the category q
A much debated question with respect to referential expressions is under what conditions speakers and writers produce overspecified expressions, i.e. expressions that contain more information than what is necessary for unique identification. In an earlier study we found that overspecifications facil
he issue addressed in this study is whether propositional integration and world-knowledge inference can be distinguished as separate processes during the comprehension of Dutch omdat (because) sentences. “Propositional integration” refers to the process by which the reader establishes the type of re
Several theoretical accounts have been proposed with respect to the issue how quickly the implicit causality verb bias affects the understanding of sentences such as “John beat Pete at the tennis match, because he had played very well”. They can be considered as instances of two viewpoints: the focu
The aim of this research is to study effects of global and local structure of texts and of rhetorical relations between sentences on the prosodic realization of sentences in read aloud text. Twenty texts were analyzed using Rhetorical Structure Theory. Based on these analyses, the global structure i
Superlative quantifiers (“at least 3”, “at most 3”) and comparative quantifiers (“more than 2”, “fewer than 4”) are traditionally taken to be interdefinable: the received view is that “at least n” and “at most n” are equivalent to “more than n–1” and “fewer than n+1”, respectively. Notwithstanding t
Because higher level cognitive processes generally involve the use of world knowledge, computational models of these processes require the implementation of a knowledge base. This article identifies and discusses 4 strategies for dealing with world knowledge in computational models: disregarding wor
We present a computational model that provides a unified account of inference, coherence, and disambiguation. It simulates how the build-up of coherence in text leads to the knowledge-based resolution of referential ambiguity. Possible interpretations of an ambiguity are represented by centers of gr
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