Computational Psycholinguistics: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Study of Language investigates the architecture and mechanisms which underlie the human capacity to process language. It is the first such study to integrate modern syntactic theory, cross-linguistic psychological evidence, and modern computational techniques in constructing a model of the human sentence processing mechanism. The monograph follows the rationalist tradition, arguing the central role of modularity and universal grammar in a theory of human linguistic performance. It refines the notion of modularity of mind', and presents a distributed model of syntactic processing which consists of modules aligned with the various informational types' associated with modern linguistic theories. By considering psycholinguistic evidence from a range of languages, a small number of processing principles are motivated and are demonstrated to hold universally. It is also argued that the behavior of modules, and the strategies operative within them, can be derived from an overarching Principle of Incremental Comprehension'. Audience: The book is recommended to all linguists, psycholinguists, computational linguists, and others interested in a unified and interdisciplinary study of the human language faculty.

Crocker (cognitive science, U. of Edinburgh) explores the architecture and mechanisms that underlie the capacity to process language, integrating modern syntactic theory, cross-linguistic psychological evidence, and modern computational techniques to construct a model of the sentence processing mechanisms. Following the rationalist tradition, he argues that modularity and universal grammar play the central role in a theory of linguistic performance, and presents a distributed model of syntactic processing that consists of modules aligned with the various informational types associated with modern linguistic theories. From a range of languages he distills a small number of principles, chief among them his Principle of Incremental Comprehension.
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Includes bibliographical references (p. [227]-238) and indexes.