Sentence Comprehension as Mental Simulation: An Information-Theoretic Perspective

Information

Stefan L. Frank¹ 

关键词: sentence comprehension;    mental simulation;    word information;    connectionist modeling;    word-reading time;    semantic and syntactic bootstrapping;   

DOI  :  10.3390/info2040672

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

It has been argued that the mental representation resulting from sentence comprehension is not (just) an abstract symbolic structure but a “mental simulation” of the state-of-affairs described by the sentence. We present a particular formalization of this theory and show how it gives rise to quantifications of the amount of syntactic and semantic information conveyed by each word in a sentence. These information measures predict simulated word-processing times in a dynamic connectionist model of sentence comprehension as mental simulation. A quantitatively similar relation between information content and reading time is known to be present in human reading-time data.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2011 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.