Accounting For Crosslinguistic Variation: A Constraint-Based Perspective

Abstract

This chapter discusses distinction in recent psycholinguistic research and outlines a number of current theories of sentence processing. It presents relevant crosslinguistic data on modifier attachment in English and Spanish. These data suggest several conclusions concerning the role of crosslinguistic data in forming theories of sentence processing. The constraint-based models propose that a number of sources of information are initially relevant to sentence comprehension, and there are no architectural limitations to the use of certain kinds of information. Pragmatic information exerts a strong influence in constraining crosslinguistic variation and on processing in general. The chapter proposes that frequency sensitivity emerges from general processing constraints, and is constrained by various kinds of pragmatic information. Both crosslinguistic similarity and variation emerge from the interaction of the speaker's environment and specific pragmatic properties of the cognitive system.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 25 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.