• Cross-Cultural Studies
• /
• v.24
• /
• pp.157-169
• /
• 2011

Compared to studies on prosodic effects on the comprehension of syntactic ambiguity in English, there are relatively few that investigated prosodic effects in East-Asian languages. This study examined the role of prosodic information in processing syntactically ambiguous sentences in Japanese. For syntactically ambiguous sentences containing relative clauses, this paper investigated whether prosodic information is immediately available during the process of these ambiguous sentences. Results from an auditory comprehension experiment with an on-line, cross-modal naming task seemingly suggest that contrary to the findings from the off-line study that examined the same constructions, prosodic information may not be immediately available to Japanese listeners. A possible account for failure to obtain effects of prosodic information is provided.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.18 no.11
• /
• pp.527-539
• /
• 2018

Cognitive decline in aging is known to yield detrimental effects in syntactic processing and working memory capacity is the most crucial cognitive function in understanding older adults' sentence processing skills. This study examined how young and older adults utilize contextual information while resolving NP-attached Ps vis word-by-word self-paced reading paradigm. In addition, the study asked which cognitive functions play roles on the use of a NP-supporting context during processing of NP-attached PP. When NP-attached PP was presented in a supporting context, both age groups performed faster than in the null context condition. Among different cognitive functions, alternating attention skills were correlated with the ability utilizing context during syntactic ambiguity resolution and working memory capacity was not found to be crucial for this study. In conclusion, this study suggests that aging does not always affect older adults' syntactic processing negatively and relevant cognitive function may vary depending on the type of syntactic structure.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Language and Information Conference
• /
• 2007.11a
• /
• pp.163-172
• /
• 2007

This paper examines some syntactic and semantic properties of the negative construction V+bo NP (VbN) in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM). It finds out that there are ambiguities between an episode reading and a generic reading in VbN construction which require further investigations and explanations. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to account for the ambiguities lying in the negative VbN construction.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
• /
• v.3 no.1
• /
• pp.1-24
• /
• 1991

This paper presents the Lexical Ambiguity Resolution System of Korean Language. This system uses Dependency grammar and Collative Semantics. Dependency grammar is used to analyze Korean syntactic dependency. A robust way to analyze a sentence is to establish links between individual words. Collative Semantics investigates the interplay between lexical ambiguity and semantics relations. Collative Semantics consists of sense-frame, semantic vector, collation, and screening. Our system was implemented by C programming language. This system analyzes sentences, discriminates the kinds of semantic relation between pairs of words senses in those sentences, and resolves lexical ambiguity.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.9 no.2
• /
• pp.61-68
• /
• 2017

The aim of this study is to investigate the prosodic aspects of ambiguous sentences in Korean produced by Chinese Korean Learners (L1: Chinese, L2: Korean). In Korean, sentence ambiguity can be caused by homonym or syntactically ambiguous structure. In spoken language however all ambiguity can be resolved by different prosodic features according to the meaning that they transmit. In this study we examined whether Chinese Korean Leaners also distinguish, in production, ambiguous sentences on the basis of prosodic characteristics. For this study 4 Korean natives speakers and 10 advanced Chinese Korean learners participated in the production test. The material analysed constituted 10 Korean sentences in which 6 sentences are lexically ambiguous and 4 sentences contain structural ambiguity. The results show that Korean native speakers produced ambiguous sentences by different prosodic structure depending on their semantic and syntactic structure. Chinese speakers also show distinct prosodic structure for different ambiguous sentences in most cases. But in the phonetic realization, the internal pitch range was greater for Korean native speakers than Chinese learners.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.10 no.3
• /
• pp.175-185
• /
• 2003

Japanese and Turkish are syntactically similar to each other, and there are syntactic structures that become ambiguous in terms of NP's and VP's modified by adjectives and adverbs, respectively. The prosody can play a crucial role in differentiating ambiguous sentences to correctly reflect their intended syntactic structures. In what way do the speakers of Sendai dialect of Japanese and Turkish use prosodic elements to differentiate syntactic ambiguities? Acoustic measurements were made of utterances of ambiguous sentences in Japanese and Turkish to observe prosodic strategies for disambiguation. Materials were sentences of the type ADV-VP1-NP-VP2, ADV-NP1-NP2-VP2, where the ambiguity lies in locative adverbial modification, ADV modifying either VP1 or VP2. For this construction the Japanese and Turkish creates the same ambiguities. In this paper, I look at duration, F0, and pause as observed in their speech and see how each language uses three prosodic elements in disambiguation. The results show that both speakers of Sendai dialect in Japan and those of Ankara dialect in Turky use lengthening of the syllable and/or pause before the boundary.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
• /
• 1988.07a
• /
• pp.675-678
• /
• 1988

This paper describes the method of syntactic-semantic pattern recognition and description for two dimensional object which is adjusted or changed in size and its orientation. To avoid the complexity and ambiguity which is arised in the case of syntactic or decision-theoretic method is used individually, an attributed grammar is introduced which applies computative attributes to pattern primitives, and then uses decision-theoretic method for attributes and syntactic method for pattern structure. A primitive extraction embedding parsing and grobal rule for classification is also applied for more effective pattern recognition and description.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.15 no.4
• /
• pp.67-81
• /
• 2008

The accuracy rate of P2G (Phoneme-to-Grapheme) is one of the important factors determining the quality of unlimited voice recognition (VR) systems. Few studies were, however, conducted to reduce ambiguities of a phoneme string which can be segmented into a variety of different linguistic units (i.e. morphemes, words, eo-jeols), thus be transformed into more than one grapheme string. This paper is a preliminary research for building a large knowledge base of those homonymic & heterographic units(HHUs), which will provide unlimited Korean VR systems with more accurate P2G information. This paper analyzes 2 main factors generating HHUs: (1) boundary determination of the prosodic unit; (2) its segmentation into linguistic units. In this paper, linguistic characteristics determining variable boundaries of a prosodic unit are investigated, and the ambiguity types of HHUs are classified in accordance with their morphological and syntactic structures as well as with the phonological rules governing them.

• Language and Information
• /
• v.7 no.2
• /
• pp.59-79
• /
• 2003

Coordination in natural language is often syntactically explained by the rule schema X \longrightarrow X′ and X", where X′ and X" refer to expressions of a like syntactic type. While this schema does explain a lot of instances of coordination, it is well known that this schema also gives rise to serious structural ambiguity, leading not only to numerous unintended interpretations but also to a high degree of unnecessary computational complexity. In order to identify intended interpretations, we need to take into account a number of clues at all the levels of morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics/discourse. In this paper, we propose, with an accompanying data analysis, principles of symmetry and coherency for an effective and reasonable identification of intended interpretations from coordination-bearing sentences.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
• /
• v.13 no.2
• /
• pp.125-130
• /
• 2003

This paper presents a simple method of supervised word sense disambiguation using decision lists based on syntactic clues. This approach focuses on the syntactic relations between the given ambiguous word and surrounding words in context for resolving a given sense ambiguity. By identifying and utilizing only the single best disambiguation evidence in a given context instead of combining a set of clues, the algorithm decides the correct sense. Experiments with 10 Korean verbs show that adding syntactic clues to a basic set of surrounding context words improves 33% higher performance than baseline accuracy. In addition, our method using decision lists is 3% higher than a method using integration of all disambiguation evidences.