Race-Based Parsing and Syntactic Disambiguation

We present a processing model that integrates same important psychological claims about the human sentence-parsing mechanism: namely, that processing is influenced by limitations an working memory and by various syntactic preferences. The model uses time-constraint information to resolve conflicting preferences in a psychologically plausible way. The starting paint far this proposal is the Sausage Machine model (Fodor & Frazier, 1980: Frazier & Fodor, 1978). From there, we attempt to overcome the original model's dependence an ad hoc aspects of its grammar, and its omission of verb-frame preferences. We also add mechanisms far lexical disambiguation and semantic processing in parallel with syntactic processing.