A Computational Theory of Processing Overload and Garden-Path Effects

The limited capacity of working memory is intrinsic to human sentence processing, and therefore must be addressed by any theory of human sentence processing. I assume that the amount of short term memory that is necessary at any stage in the parsing process is determined by the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of the structure(s) that have been built up to that point in the parse. A sentence becomes unacceptable for processing reasons if the combination of these properties produces too great a load for the working memory capacity (cf. F r~ i e r (1985), Gibson (1987)): (1) t l