Behavioral and Brain Sciences



Open Peer Commentary

On the structural ambiguity in natural language that the neural architecture cannot deal with


Rens Bod a1a2 , Hartmut Fitz a3 and Willem Zuidema a1
a1 Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam 1018TV, The Netherlands rens@science.uva.nl http://www.science.uva.nl/~rens
a2 School of Computing, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK fitz@science.uva.nl http://amor.cms.hu-berlin.de/~h2784i25
a3 Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam 1012CP, The Netherlands jzuidema@science.uva.nl http://www.science.uva.nl/~jzuidema

Article author query
bod r   [PubMed][Google Scholar] 
fitz h   [PubMed][Google Scholar] 
zuidema w   [PubMed][Google Scholar] 

Abstract

We argue that van der Velde's & de Kamps's model does not solve the binding problem but merely shifts the burden of constructing appropriate neural representations of sentence structure to unexplained preprocessing of the linguistic input. As a consequence, their model is not able to explain how various neural representations can be assigned to sentences that are structurally ambiguous.