Publisher's Synopsis
An increased understanding of human speech comprehension is a major goal for research groups from numerous closely-related disciplines, and the results of work in this area will have direct implications for automated speech recognition technology as well as natural language processing.;This text shows how an increased understanding of language leads to an insight into the nature of language itself, and eventually to functional explanation of linguistic facts. The author concentrates on the process of morpho-syntactic analysis (or parsing) during speech comprehension, arguing that a psychologically plausible model of this process must be compatible with known limitations on working memory, as well as being robust in the face of degraded input. It should also allow for early and incremental semantic analysis of the incoming utterance.;The book presents a deterministic model of parsing which is embedded in a theory of interaction sufficiently restrictive to maintain modularity, but powerful enough to allow successful resolution of local and global morpho-syntactic ambiguities at their onset. Unlike other extant deterministic parsers, this model does not delay analysis and is more in accord with early semantic interpretation.
