Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper presents CAPERS, a hybrid spreading ac- tivation/marker pjissing architecture for parsing, whose self-processing network directly represents a parse tree. C A P E R S establishes syntactic dependencies through the purely local communication of simple syntactic features within the network. The structural constraints on two nodes in a long-distance syntactic relation are broken down into locsil components, each of which can be ver- ified entirely between pairs of adjacent nodes along the feature passing path between the two dependent nodes. This method of establishing long-distance syntactic rela- tions, in conjunction with the competitive dynamics of the network, accounts for psycholinguistic experimental data onfiller/gap constructions.