syntactic processing

n. Syntactic processing, or parsing, is the process of recovering syntactic structure from a perceived string of words. Linguistic signals – written, acoustic, or gestural – are first decoded into a string of linearly ordered lexical items. The syntactic processor must determine the hierarchical relations between these lexical items. It does so generally in a left-toright fashion, following a handful of heuristics, or parsing strategies, by which it builds the simplest structure. Parsing strategies are grounded on limitations imposed by the cognitive architecture, including working memory limitations. Evidence for the existence of parsing strategies has come from garden path sentences, like The horse raced past the barn fell. In such sentences, the initial analysis built by the syntactic processor (here, taking raced to be the main verb of the sentence) turns out to be incorrect (raced is really the participle of an omitted verb in a reduced relative clause; cf. The horse that was raced past the barn fell). Garden path sentences are difficult to process because their correct structure violates a parsing strategy, that is, a principle of syntactic processing. – EMF