Garden Path Phenomena and the Grammatical Basis of Language Processing

A central issue in the field of language processing concerns how grammatical theory and parsing are related. Evidence from processing breakdown (GARDEN PATH phenomena) reveals the conditions under which local ambiguity results in unprocessable sentences. These data provide evidence that the processor operates by admitting structure which maximally satisfies the principles of Government and Binding Theory locally at every point during a parse, and that the constraints on syntactic reanalysis during processing are also derived from grammatical theory. Alternative approaches to parsing are demonstrated to be incapable of accounting for the wide range of garden path effects.