The time-course of syntactic structure building during language comprehension

It is a well-known intuition that human sentence understanding works in an incremental fashion, with a seemingly constant update of the interpretation through the left-to-right processing of a string. Such intuitions are backed up by experimental evidence dating from at least as far back as Marslen-Wilson (1973), showing that under many circumstances, interpretations are indeed updated very quickly.

From a parsing point of view it is interesting to consider the structure-building processes that might underlie incremental interpretation---what kinds of partial structures are built during sentence processing, and with what time-course?

In this talk I will give an overview of the state-of-the-art of experimental psycholinguistic research, paying particular attention to the time-course of structure-building. The discussion will focus on a new line of research (some as yet unpublished) in which syntactic phenomena such as binding relations and unbounded dependencies are exploited to make a very direct test of the availability of syntactic structure over time.