A competition-based explanation of syntactic attachment preferences and garden path phenomena
Suzanne Stevenson · 1993
This paper presents a massively parallel parser that predicts critical attachment behaviors of the human sentence processor, without the use of explicit preference heuristics or revision strategies. The processing of a syntactic ambiguity is modeled as an active, distributed competition among the potential attachments for a phrase. Computationally motivated constraints on the competitive mechanism provide a principled and uniform account of a range of human attachment preferences and garden path phenomena.