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Language and ambiguity

  • Part III Communication Issues
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Intelligent Perceptual Systems

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 745))

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Abstract

Language is a complex object that needs to be tackled from different perspectives. Psycholinguistic research on people's ability to understand language, particularly spoken language, indicates that ambiguity is present at all levels at which one can analyze discourse, from how the speech stream is to be segmented to how a speaker's intentions are to be interpreted. Ambiguity, in fact, is not a limited event in language, but a pervasive phenomenon whose resolution is of general interest among cognitive scientists for several reasons. Firstly, ambiguity offers a powerful tool to explore how different types of information are coordinated during language comprehension. Secondly, and relatedly, ambiguity resolution plays an important role in current debates on the architecture of the mind. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, ambiguity presents a theoretical challenge because models of language comprehension must explain how linguistic processes deal with this phenomenon while performing their tasks.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Facolta' di Lettere e Filosofia, Universita' di Ferrara, Via Savonarola 38, 44100, Ferrara, Italy

    Patrizia Tabossi

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  1. Patrizia Tabossi
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Vito Roberto

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© 1993 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Tabossi, P. (1993). Language and ambiguity. In: Roberto, V. (eds) Intelligent Perceptual Systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 745. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-57379-8_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-57379-8_13

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-57379-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48103-4

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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