Syntactic Parsing

Publisher Summary This chapter presents a discussion on syntactic parsing. Majority of sentence processing research has continued to address relatively traditional topics such as the initial factors affecting processing, reanalysis, and structural complexity. It now seems reasonable to conclude that completely modular accounts of initial processing such as traditional Garden-Path theory are not correct and that the processor draws on a range of sources of information during initial processing. However, there are good reasons to believe that structural information does play a role during sentence processing and cannot be reduced to a set of weakly interacting constraints. Whereas research has shown that discourse context, plausibility, and frequency play important roles during sentence processing, they often do not entirely override basic preferences for particular types of structure. Sentence is judged grammatically more often than a comparable sentence in which the reparandum is ambiguous (picked). This interpretation would suggest that a reparandum behaves similarly as a subliminal fast prime. These examples suggest that parsing research may begin to focus more on naturalistic language, dialog, and the integration with complex nonlinguistic contexts. One effect of these trends is that there may be a closer link between comprehension and production—in particular, between parsing and syntactic encoding during production.