We present a detailed process theory of the moment-by-moment working-memory retrievals and associated control structure that subserve sentence comprehension. The theory is derived from the application of independently motivated principles of memory and cognitive skill to the specialized task of sentence parsing. The resulting theory construes sentence processing as a series of skilled associative memory retrievals modulated by similarity-based interference and fluctuating activation. The cognitive principles are formalized in computational form in the Adaptive Control of Thought–Rational (ACT–R) architecture, and our process model is realized in ACT–R. We present the results of 6 sets of simulations: 5 simulation sets provide quantitative accounts of the effects of length and structural interference on both unambiguous and garden-path structures. A final simulation set provides a graded taxonomy of double center embeddings ranging from relatively easy to extremely difficult. The explanation of center-embedding difficulty is a novel one that derives from the model’s complete reliance on discriminating retrieval cues in the absence of an explicit representation of serial order information. All fits were obtained with only 1 free scaling parameter fixed across the simulations; all other parameters were ACT–R defaults. The modeling results support the hypothesis that fluctuating activation and similarity-based interference are the key factors shaping working memory in sentence processing. We contrast the theory and empirical predictions with several related accounts of sentence-processing complexity.

Many recent models of language comprehension have stressed the role of distributional frequencies in determining the relative accessibility or ease of processing associated with a particular lexical item or sentence structure. However, there exist relatively few comprehensive analyses of structural frequencies, and little consideration has been given to the appro- priateness of using any particular set of corpus frequencies in modeling human language. We provide a comprehensive set of structural frequencies for a variety of written and spoken corpora, focusing on structures that have played a critical role in debates on normal psycholinguistics, aphasia, and child language acquisition, and compare our results with those from several recent papers to illustrate the implications and limitations of using corpus data in psycholinguistic research.

Abstract. Most linguistic theories since Chomsky (1973) have hypothesized that longdistance dependencies crossing multiple clauses are mediated by intermediate structures. This paper provides a new source of evidence for the existence of such intermediate structures: reading times during online sentence comprehension. The experiment presented here compares reading times for two structures involving the long-distance extraction of a wh-filler: (a) a structure in which a clause intervenes between the endpoints of the extraction, and (b) a structure in which a nominalization of the clause intervenes. The logic of the experiment relies on two hypotheses: first, that intermediate structures mediate the relationship between a wh-filler and its h-roleassigning verb when a clause intervenes between them but not when a nominalization intervenes; and second, that reading times for a word increase as linear distance increases between the word and the position on which it is dependent in the partial structure for the input (Gibson 1998, 2000; Grodner, Watson & Gibson 2000). In combination, these hypotheses predict that reading times at the region in which the verb assigns a h-role to the wh-filler will be faster in the clausal conditions than in the nominalized conditions, because in the clausal conditions intermediate structure mediate the wh-filler verb dependency and cause it to be more local. This prediction was confirmed. 1.

Dynamical systems of language processing predict that sentence processing complexity is not only a function of the globally coherent structure ranging from the beginning of the sentence to its current point of processing, but also a function of locally coherent sub-parses. This paper presents an experiment that tests whether locally coherent, yet globally false continuations affect on-line anomaly detection times. The results indicate that they do interfere with processing, but only if the global analysis is not too demanding. This result can be seen as an indicator of the psychological reality of local coherence processing, and hence supports the dynamic system view on language processing.

That comprehension of object relatives constitutes a difficult domain in acquisition and pathology as well as in adult parsing, is a well known and robustly established fact (see Friedmann, Belletti, Rizzi (2009) for relevant references on classical work on acquisition and parsing; Adani (2008) for recent results on acquisition; Grillo (2008)

A central question in online human sentence comprehension is: how are linguistic relations established between different parts of a sentence? Previous work has shown that this dependency resolution process can be computationally expensive, but the underlying reasons for this are still unclear. We argue that dependency resolution is mediated by cue-based retrieval, constrained by independently motivated working memory principles defined in a cognitive architecture (ACT-R). To demonstrate this, we investigate an unusual instance of dependency resolution, the processing of negative and positive polarity items, and confirm a surprising prediction of the cue-based retrieval model: partial cue-matches—which constitute a kind of similarity-based interference—can give rise to the intrusion of ungrammatical retrieval candidates, leading to both processing slow-downs and even errors of judgment that take the form of illusions of grammaticality in patently ungrammatical structures. A notable achievement is that good quantitative fits are achieved without adjusting the key model parameters.

It is well known that the field of linguistics is suffering from the lack of unification between theoretical and experimental linguistics (Embick and Poeppel 2006), due to the lack of granularity between the primitives used in these fields. In this context, this research puts forward a research program to achieve a degree of unification between the said disciplines. Specifically, it is claimed that the optimality/efficiency dynamics that the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995) has unveiled might provide the right primitives to bridge the gap between these fields. This view is developed by (re)considering some standard constraints on syntactic movement, namely, Relativized Minimality (RM; Rizzi 1990, 2001 and Starke 2001). RM can be defined in the following way: A movement operation cannot involve X and Y over a Z which is relevantly identical to Y in the configuration …X…Z…Y … if Z c-commands Y (Hornstein 2006). This is illustrated in (1). RM is part of the optimal nature of language in that it serves to reduce the number of possible structural relations that transformations may take. Still, its origin remains obscure. It is argued that this constraint follows from independently attested similarity-based interference effects in memory, namely, from fan-effects as a function of cue overlap (e.g., Anderson and Neely 1996, Gordon et al. 2006 or Lewis and Shravan 2005). In memory research, interference refers to the impaired ability to retrieve an item when it is similar to other items stored in memory. These interference effects are caused by

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