Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Following Fodor (1983), it is assumed that the language processor is an automatic device that maintains only the best of the set of all compatible representations for an input string. One way to make this idea explicit is to assume the serial hypothesis: at most one representation for an input string is permitted at any time (e.g.. Frazier & Fodor (1978), Frazier (1979), and Pritchett (1988)). This paper assumes an alternative formulation of local memory restrictions within a parallel framework. First of all, it is assumed that there exists a number of structural properties, each of which is associated with a processing load. One structure is preferred over another if the processing load associated with the first structure is markedly lower than the processing load associated with the second. Thus a garden-path effect results if the unpreferred structure is necessary for a grammatical sentence. This paper presents three structural properties within this framework: the first two- the Properties of Thematic Assignment and Reception- derivable from the ^-Criterion of Government and Binding Theory (Chomsky (1981)); and the third- the Property of Recency Preference- that prefers local attachments over more distant atuchments. This paper shows how these properties interact to give appropriate predictions- garden-path effects or not- for a large array of local ambiguities.