It is generally assumed that hierarchical phrase structure plays a central role in human
language. However, considerations of simplicity and evolutionary continuity suggest that …

In the generative tradition, the language faculty has been shrinking—perhaps to include only
the mechanism of recursion. This paper argues that even this view of the language faculty is …

A major goal of psycholinguistic theory is to account for the cognitive constraints limiting the
speed and ease of language comprehension and production. Wide-ranging evidence …

Memory is fleeting. New material rapidly obliterates previous material. How, then, can the
brain deal successfully with the continual deluge of linguistic input? We argue that, to deal …

A work that reveals the profound links between the evolution, acquisition, and processing of
language, and proposes a new integrative framework for the language sciences. Language …

A key component of research on human sentence processing is to characterize the
processing difficulty associated with the comprehension of words in context. Models that …

This book introduces formal grammar theories that play a role in current linguistic theorizing
(Phrase Structure Grammar, Transformational Grammar/Government & Binding, Generalized …

Language models (LMs) have been used in cognitive modeling as well as engineering
studies--they compute information-theoretic complexity metrics that simulate humans' …

Probabilistic expectations and memory limitations are central factors governing the real-time
comprehension of natural language, but how the two factors interact remains poorly …

Although syntactic complexity has been investigated across dozens of studies, the available
data still greatly underdetermine relevant theories of processing difficulty. Memory-based …