Race-Based Parsing and Syntactic Disambiguation

We present a processing model that integrates some important psychological claims about the human sentence parsing mechanism, namely that processing is innuenced by limitations on working memory and by various syntactic preferences. The model uses time-constraint information to resolve connicting preferences in a psychologically plausible way. The starting point for this proposal is the Sausage Machine model (Frazier and Fodor, 1978; Fodor and Frazier, 1980). From there, we attempt to overcome the original model's dependence on ad hoc aspects of its grammar, and its omission of verb-frame preferences. We also add mechanisms for lexical disambiguation and semantic processing in parallel with syntactic processing.