Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Psycholinguistic models of language processing usually postulate that parsing the syntactic structure of a sen- tence proceeds incrementally in s o m e way, which means that the syntactic analysis is not delayed until the end of the clause or sentence. In this paper w e will discuss dif- ferent conceptions of incrementality in the light of em- pirical studies on the influence of grammatical case on structure building in German subject-object asymme- tries. It will be shown that neither word-by-word attach- ment of partial structures into the phrase marker of the sentence (Frazier, 1987a), nor head comer parsing (Ab- ney, 1987; Kay, 1989) can explain the data found in our experiments. A s a strategy which is consistent with our data, left-comer parsing (Johnson-Laird, 1983) will be discussed.