Disambiguation and Grammar as Emergent Soft Constraints
Risto Miikkulainen, Marshall R. Mayberry, III · Psychology Press eBooks · 2013
How do people arrive at an interpretation of a sentence? The thesis put forth by this chapter is that sentence processing is not a crisp symbolic process, but instead emerges from bringing together a number of soft constraints, such as the syntactic structure of the sentence and semantic associations between its constituents. Consider the following sentence: The girl who the boy hit cried.