Computationelle Neurolinguistik
Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät
Computational neurolinguistics integrates methods from computational (psycho-)linguistics and computational neuroscience in order to model neural correlates of linguistic behavior. We illustrate these techniques using a example of the language processing of German negative polarity items (NPI) in the event-related brain potential (ERP) paradigm. To that aim, we first describe the syntactic and semantic licensing conditions of NPIs by means of slightly modified minimalist grammars. In a second step we use dynamic cognitive modeling (DCM) to map the state descriptions of a minimalist parser onto activation patterns of a neural network. Thirdly, the network’s synaptic weights are trained with the correct parse of NPI constructions. Using these weights we calculate neural harmony measures for correct and for ungrammatical NPI constructions. In a final step we correlate the harmonies of the dynamical model with experimentally obtained ERP amplitudes by means of a simple statistical model.
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This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.