tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "MEMORY CAPACITY AND SENTENCE PROCESSING"

The limited capacity of working memory is intrinsic to human sentence processing, and therefore must be addressed by any theory of human sentence processing. This paper gives a theory of garden-path effects and processing overload that is based on simple assumptions about human short term memory capacity. hypothesis, is easily compatible with the above view of processing load calculation: given a choice between two different representations for the same input string, simply choose the representation that is associated with the lower processing load. . | MEMORY CAPACITY AND SENTENCE PROCESSING Edward Gibson Department of Philosophy Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh PA 15213-3890 gibson@ ABSTRACT The limited capacity of working memory is intrinsic to human sentence processing and therefore must be addressed by any theory of human sentence processing. This paper gives a theory of garden-path effects and processing overload that is based on simple assumptions about human short term memory capacity. 1 INTRODUCTION The limited capacity of working memory is intrinsic to human sentence processing and therefore must be addressed by any theory of human sentence processing. I assume that the amount of short term memory that is necessary at any stage in the parsing process is determined by the syntactic semantic and pragmatic properties of the structurefs that have been built up to that point in the parse. A sentence becomes unacceptable for processing reasons if the combination of these properties produces too great a load for the working memory capacity cf. Frazier 1985 1 n ỀA K i l where K is the maximum allowable processing load in processing load units or PLUs Xi is the number of PLUS associated with property i n is the number of properties Ai is the number of times property i appears in the structure in question. Furthermore the assumptions described above provide a simple mechanism for the explanation of common psycholinguistic phenomena such as garden-path effects and preferred readings for ambiguous sentences. Following Fodor 1983 I assume that the language processor is an automatic device that uses a greedy algorithm only the best of the set of all compatible representations for an input string are locally maintained from word to word. One way to make this idea explicit is to assume that restrictions on memory allow at most one representation for an input string at any time see for example Frazier and Fodor 1978 Frazier 1979 Marcus 1980 Berwick and Weinberg 1984 Pritchett 1988 . This hypothesis .