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.

翻译：人类按照听到的顺序逐词理解句子。这种增量处理过程需要解决临时的句法关系歧义。我们通过将增量生成式依存句法分析器的预测与功能神经影像时间过程数据（受试者收听有声书时采集）进行关联，探究人类如何处理这些句法歧义。具体而言，我们比较了关于逐词理解过程中同时存在的句法分析路径数量的竞争性假设：单路径与多路径。该比较涉及评估采用LLM自适应编码的最新依存句法分析器输出的句法惊讶度，并与现有fMRI数据集进行对照。在英语和中文数据中，我们均发现了多路径句法分析的证据。与这种多路径效应相关的大脑区域包括双侧颞上回。