There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
This paper proposes a new theory of the relationship between the sentence processing
mechanism and the available computational resources. This theory--the Syntactic Prediction
Locality Theory (SPLT)--has two components: an integration cost component and a component
for the memory cost associated with keeping track of obligatory syntactic requirements.
Memory cost is hypothesized to be quantified in terms of the number of syntactic categories
that are necessary to complete the current input string as a grammatical sentence.
Furthermore, in accordance with results from the working memory literature both memory
cost and integration cost are hypothesized to be heavily influenced by locality (1)
the longer a predicted category must be kept in memory before the prediction is satisfied,
the greater is the cost for maintaining that prediction; and (2) the greater the distance
between an incoming word and the most local head or dependent to which it attaches,
the greater the integration cost. The SPLT is shown to explain a wide range of processing
complexity phenomena not previously accounted for under a single theory, including
(1) the lower complexity of subject-extracted relative clauses compared to object-extracted
relative clauses, (2) numerous processing overload effects across languages, including
the unacceptability of multiply center-embedded structures, (3) the lower complexity
of cross-serial dependencies relative to center-embedded dependencies, (4) heaviness
effects, such that sentences are easier to understand when larger phrases are placed
later and (5) numerous ambiguity effects, such as those which have been argued to
be evidence for the Active Filler Hypothesis.