A finite-state model of human sentence processing

It has previously been assumed in the psycholinguistic literature that finite-state models of language are crucially limited in their explanatory power by the locality of the probability distribution and the narrow scope of information used by the model. We show that a simple computational model (a bigram part-of-speech tagger based on the design used by Corley and Crocker (2000)) makes correct predictions on processing difficulty observed in a wide range of empirical sentence processing data. We use two modes of evaluation: one that relies on comparison with a control sentence, paralleling practice in human studies; another that measures probability drop in the disambiguating region of the sentence. Both are surprisingly good indicators of the processing difficulty of garden-path sentences. The sentences tested are drawn from published sources and systematically explore five different types of ambiguity: previous studies have been narrower in scope and smaller in scale, We do not deny the limitations of finite-state models, but argue that our results show that their usefulness has been underestimated.