The Interaction of Syntactic Theory and Computational Psycholinguistics

Typically, current research in psycholinguistics does not rely heavily on results from theoretical linguistics. In particular, most experimental work studying human sentence processing makes very straightforward assumptions about sentence structure; essentially only a simple context-free grammar is assumed. The main text book in psycholinguistics, for instance, mentions Minimalism in its chapter on linguistic description (Harley, 2001, ch. 2), but does not provide any details, and all the examples in this chapter, as well as in the chapters on sentence processing and language production (Harley, 2001, chs. 9, 12), only use context-free syntactic structures with uncontroversial phrase markers (S, VP, NP, etc.). The one exception is traces, which the textbook discusses in the context of syntactic ambiguity resolution.