Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper presents a model of the human sentence interpretation process, concentrating on modeling psycholinguistic data through the use of rich semantic and grammatical knowledge and expectations. The interpreter is an on-line model, in that it reads words left-to-right, maintaining a partial interpretation of the sentence at all times. It is strongly interactionist in using both bottom-up evidence and topdown suggestions to access a set of constructions to be used in building candidate interpretations. It uses a coherencebased selection mechanism to choose among these candidate interpretations, and allows temporary limited parallelism to handle local ambiguities. The interpreter is a unified one, with respect to both representation and process. A single kind of knowledge structure, the grammatical construction, is used to represent lexical, syntactic and semantic knowledge, and a single processing module is used to access and integrate these structures.