Automaton Theories of Human Sentence Comprehension

By relating grammar to cognitive architecture, John T. Hale shows step-by-step how incremental parsing works in models of perceptual processing and how specific learning rules might lead to frequency-sensitive preferences. Along the way, Hale reconsiders garden-pathing, the parallel/serial distinction, and information-theoretical complexity metrics, such as surprisal. This book is a must for cognitive scientists of language.