Humans understand sentences word-by-word, in the order that they hear them.
This incrementality entails resolving temporary ambiguities about syntactic
relationships. We investigate how humans process these syntactic ambiguities by
correlating predictions from incremental generative dependency parsers with
timecourse data from people undergoing functional neuroimaging while listening
to an audiobook. In particular, we compare competing hypotheses regarding the
number of developing syntactic analyses in play during word-by-word
comprehension: one vs more than one. This comparison involves evaluating
syntactic surprisal from a state-of-the-art dependency parser with LLM-adapted
encodings against an existing fMRI dataset. In both English and Chinese data,
we find evidence for multipath parsing. Brain regions associated with this
multipath effect include bilateral superior temporal gyrus.

人类通过逐词理解句子来理解句子，这意味着需要解决关于句法关系的临时歧义。我们通过将增量式生成依赖解析器的预测与人们在听音频书时进行功能性神经影像学时期的时间数据相关联来研究人类如何处理这些句法歧义。特别是，我们比较两种关于逐词理解中涉及的句法解析数量的竞争假设：一个与多个。这种比较包括使用经过 LLM 自适应编码的最先进的依赖解析器评估句法意外性与现有的 fMRI 数据集。在英文和中文数据中，我们发现了多通路解析的证据。与这种多通路效应相关的大脑区域包括双侧颞上沟。