Processing polarity: How the ungrammatical intrudes on the grammatical - ACT-R model

The issue of processing polarity items within ACT-R was approached on the basis of the sentence processing model originally described by Shravan Vasishth and Rick Lewis in terms of a serial left-corner parser. Please refer to Lewis & Vasishth (2005) and Vasishth, Brüssow, Lewis & Drenhaus (2008) for further information.

Note! The model has not been tested with Windows; it has only been used with Mac OS X.

Material

ACT-R-environmentEnhanced.tar.gz
AdditionalMaterial.tar.gz
VBLDCogSci08.pdf
latest9.tgz

Model files (extracted latest9.tgz)

COPYING
chunk-types.actr
chunks.actr
commands.actr
constants.actr
interface-code.actr
lex-support.actr
patches.actr
productions.actr
sp.actr
stuff.lisp

Instructions

1. tar -xvfz latest9.tgz
2. Start ACT-R and load sp.actr.
3. Have a look at stuff.lisp. You write trace files for each condition with

   	(tof-pirat 50)
   	

   You can chose a higher value than 50, BUT KEEP IN MIND the overproportional increase in duration when running the model. I decided to let it run several times and concatenate the traces to the existing ones afterwards. This is at first sight circumstantial, but saves time. There is certainly a more elegant solution to this. However, here in the following I describe how to gather runs with the suggested method.
4. When the function is ready QUIT ACT-R. In the folder "traces" you find the newly created traces and folders with the already existing traces (those the fresh traces should be concatenated to)

   	-rw-r--r--   1 bruessow  staff  65952 30 Oct 17:10 trace.pirat-a
   	-rw-r--r--   1 bruessow  staff  66364 30 Oct 17:11 trace.pirat-b
   	-rw-r--r--   1 bruessow  staff  66404 30 Oct 17:11 trace.pirat-c
   	-rw-r--r--   1 bruessow  staff  66086 30 Oct 17:11 trace.pirat-d
   	-rw-r--r--   1 bruessow  staff  66179 30 Oct 17:11 trace.pirat-e
   	-rw-r--r--   1 bruessow  staff  65909 30 Oct 17:11 trace.pirat-f
   	drwxr-xr-x  33 bruessow  staff   1122 30 Oct 17:01 traces-pirat-ans015
   	drwxr-xr-x  19 bruessow  staff    646  2 Jul 23:33 traces-pirat-ans030
   	drwxr-xr-x  17 bruessow  staff    578  2 Jul 23:33 traces-pirat-ans045
   

5. In the top-level "scripts" folder you find a bash-script. From the traces folder i.e. execute ../conc-traces-pirat-ans015.sh This concatenates the new traces to the old ones in the corresponding folder. If not, copy the appropriate concatenation script to the "traces" folder . WHICH SCRIPT YOU USE DEPENDS ON THE ACTIVATION NOISE PARAMETER YOU HAVE SET IN commands.actr! Just look at the cancatenation scripts, they are so simple, just a few commands, I dare call them scripts.
6. Now you have to repeat the whole procedure, start ACT-R, call the function....until you have 1000 runs complete.
7. Then you can change to the folder where you gathered the traces, i.e. traces-pirat-ans015. There again are several script. Type...

   ./doit.sh

   This invokes the awk-scripts and generates the tables for R (*.completed, *.txt)

References

• Richard L. Lewis and Shravan Vasishth. An activation-based model of sentence processing as skilled memory retrieval. Cognitive Science, 29:1-45, May 2005.
• Shravan Vasishth, Sven Brüssow, Richard L. Lewis, and Heiner Drenhaus. Processing polarity: How the ungrammatical intrudes on the grammatical. Cognitive Science, 32(4), 2008.