Is There a Syntactic Processing Module?

Eiichi Yubune

In the research on language processing of English sentences, two major opposing views have been proposed. One is the Modularity Hypothesis, which suggests that the initial computation of the syntactic structure of a sentence is not affected by the plausibility given by the meanings of the words or the discourse context. In other words, syntactic preferences initially determine the outcome of on-line parsing process. The other is the Interactive Model, where an interactive activation between different levels of representations is permitted, and the plausibility can influence the interpreter’s (reader’s) initial analysis.

In this essay, three kinds of syntactic constructions which can bring about local ambiguities (garden-path sentences) are re-examined to see whether the human parser actually behaves as the autonomous theorists claim by reviewing relevant researches on (interactive) syntactic processing. I suggest that syntactic processing is not always autonomous but semantic information intrinsic to individual words or discoursal context also plays a major role in human parsing at its initial stage.