Marzi – Nahli – Pirrelli,Computational Linguistics and Language Physiology: insights from word processing

Computer processing of written words in different languages (e.g. Italian, German or Arabic) raises a number of challenges to traditional parsing architectures on many levels of linguistic analysis. We intend to assess these issues in connection with the behaviour of neuro-biologically inspired lexical architectures known as Temporal Self-Organising Maps. We show that, far from being language-specific problems, issues in word processing can shed light on some fundamental characteristics of the human language processor, such as structure-based lexical recoding, concurrent, competitive activation of output candidates and dynamic selection of optimal solutions.