Linguistic Structure and Linguistic Working Memory

Brian W. Dillon, Maryland The field of sentence processing is in the middle of a revolution in the way people view the relation between domain-general working memory processes and parsing routines, driven by novel experimental data (e.g. McElree, Foraker & Dyer 2003; Van Dyke 2007) and successful computational models (Lewis & Vasishth 2005). By tying together insights from psychology and computer science, researchers are now in a position to make specific claims about the computational character of the memory systems that drive parsing. In this talk, I will explore the contribution of linguistic structure to this line of research by presenting two case studies that examine the interaction between linguistic representation and working memory processes