Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Models of the human sentence processing mechanism have traditionally appealed to innate architectural restrictions to explain observed patterns of behavior. Recently, a number of proposcds have instead emphasized the role of linguistic experience in guiding sentence interpretation, suggesting that various frequency measures play a crucial role in ambiguity resolution. What has been lacking thus far is a detailed analysis of the linguistic and computational properties that could explain why those particular aspects of experience are effective in shaping behavior. In this paper, we present a linguistic analysis that reveals restrictions on the representational ability of the sentence processor, explaining its sensitivity to particular factors in the linguistic environment. The proposal receives strong support from a large-scale corpus analysis.