SENTENCE COMPREHENSION AS MENTAL SIMULATION: AN INFORMATION-THEORETIC ANALYSIS AND A CONNECTIONIST MODEL

摘要

It has been argued that understanding a sentence comes down to mentally simulating the state-of-affairs described by the sentence. This paper presents a particular formalization of this idea and shows how it gives rise to measures 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 connectionist model of sentence comprehension.