Abstract: The traditional paradigm of natural language understanding is that thesyntactic structure of a sentence is analysed first,according to the structure,then the semantic structure is produced, which is apparently differentfrom the process of human language understanding.There is some psychol-ogical evidence that syntax and semantics played a parallel role in under-standing language. This article proposes a new model of natural language comprehension,that is, syntax and semantics are parallel in comprehending sentences.When analysing the sentence by syntax,it might produce some ambiguoussyntactic structures, in which only one is correct.If semantics isput in work-ing with syntax at the same time,only the correct result could be ob-tained. Connectionism is becoming popular in the field of cognitive science,it provides a parallel method in processing sentences. In our work,a localconnentionist model was used to realize the paradigm of natural languageunderstanding. The model has been simulated by computer,which can pro-cess simple Chinese sentences.

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