{"pk":31625,"title":"An Architecturally-based Theory of Human Sentence Comprehension","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Real-time language comprehension is an important area of focus for a candidate unified theory of cognition. In his 1987 William James lectures, Allen Newell sketched the beginnings of a comprehension theory embedded in the Soar architecture. This theory, NL-Soar, has developed over the past few years into a detailed computational model that provides an account of a range of sentence-level phenomena: immediacy of interpretation, garden path effects, unproblematic ambiguities, parsing breakdown on difficult embeddings, acceptable embedding structures, and both modular and interactive ambiguity resolution effects. The theory goes beyond explaining just a few examples, it addresses over 80 different kinds of constructions. Soar is not merely an implementation language for the model, but plays a central theoretical role. The predictive power of NLSoar derives largely from architectural mechanisms and principles that shape the comprehension capability so that it meets the real time constraint.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Symposia","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3nx3089s","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Richard","middle_name":"L.","last_name":"Lweis","name_suffix":"","institution":"Carnegie Mellon University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"1993-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/31625/galley/22693/download/"}]}