Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigate the explanatory power of very simple statistical mechanisms within a modular model of the Human Sentence Processing Mechanism. In particular, we borrow the idea of a 'part-of-speech tagger' from the field of Naniral Language Processing, and use this to explain a number of existing experimental results in the area of lexical category disambiguation. Not only can each be explained without the need to posit extra mechanisms or constraints, but the exercise also suggests a novel account for some established data.