A Cognitive Model of Sentence Interpretation: the Construction Grammar approach

This paper describes a new, psychologically-plausible model of human sentence interpretation, based on a new model of linguistic structure, Construction Grammar. This on-line, parallel, probabilistic interpreter accounts for a wide variety of psycholinguistic results on lexical access, idiom processing, parsing preferences, and studies of gap-filling and other valence ambiguities, including various frequency effects. We show that many of these results derive from the fundamental assumptions of Construction Grammar that lexical idioms, idioms, and syntactic structures are uniformly represented as grammatical constructions, and argue for the use of probabilistically-enriched grammars and interpreters as models of human knowledge of and processing of language. Submitted to Cognitive Science