Interaction with context during human sentence processing

Psychological theories of natural language processing have usually assumed that the sentence processor resolves local syntactic ambiguities by selecting a single analysis on the basis of structural criteria such as Frazier's (1978) “minimal attachment.” According to such theories, alternative analyses will only be attempted if the initial analysis subsequently proves inconsistent with the context. (See also Ferreira & Clifton, 1986; Ford, Bresnan, & Kaplan, 1982; Rayner, Carlson, & Frazier, 1983). An alternative hypothesis exists, however: If sentences are understood incrementally, more or less word-by-word (Marlsen-Wilson, 1973, 1975), then syntactic processing can in principle exploit the fact that interpretations are available, using them “interactively” to select among alternative syntactic analyses on the basis of their plausibility with respect to the context. The present paper considers possible architectures for such incremental and interactive sentence processors, and argues for an architecture