Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper describes a computational architecture whose emergent properties yield an explanatory theory of human structural disambiguation in syntactic processing. Linguistic and computational factors conspire to dictate a particular integration of symbolic and connectionist approaches, producing a principled cognitive model of the processing of structural ambiguities. The model is a hybrid massively parallel architecture, using symbolic features and constraints to encode structural alternatives, and numeric spreading activation to capture structural preferences. The model provides a unifying explanation of a range of serial and parallel behaviors observed in the processing of structural alternatives. Furthermore, the inherent properties of active symbolic and numeric information correspond to general cognitive mechanisms which subsume a number of proposed structural preference strategies.