Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Formal theories of grammar and traditional parsing models,insofar as they presuppose a categorical notion of grammar,face the challenge of accounting for gradient judgments ofacceptability. This challenge is traditionally met by explaininggradient effects in terms of extra-grammatical factors, positinga purely categorical core for the language system. We presenta new way of accounting for gradience in a self-organizedsentence processing (SOSP) model, which generates structureswith a continuous range of grammaticality values. We focuson islands, a family of syntactic domains out of whichmovement is generally prohibited. Islands are interestingbecause, although most linguistic theories treat them asfully ungrammatical and uninterpretable, experimental studieshave revealed gradient patterns of acceptability and evidencefor their interpretability. We report simulations in whichSOSP largely respects island constraints, but in certain cases,consistent with empirical data, coerces elements that blockdependencies into elements that allow them.