Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper defends a principle-based model of sen- tence processing, and demonstrates that such a model must have two specific properties: (1) it must use a partially top-down parsing mechanism, possibly re- stricted to functional structure, and (2) it must use an Active Trace Strategy, which freely posits traces before their linear string position. It is argued that both of the proposed mechanisms follow from an over- arching Principle of Incremental Comprehension.