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<Paper uid="W04-0313">
  <Title>Modeling sentence processing in ACT-R</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Although language processing may be a specialized cognitive faculty, it is possible that it is nevertheless shaped by general constraints on the human cognitive architecture. This point has been addressed extensively in the connectionist literature, but we present a somewhat different approach to this problem by casting parsing within the cognitive architecture ACT-R (Anderson et al., 2002) and directly using the constraints provided in ACT-R to account for several interesting cross-linguistic facts: the well-known sentential complement/relative clause asymmetry (Gibson, 2000; Grodner and Gibson, 2003) and the subject/object relative clause asymmetry in English (Homes and O'Regan, 1981); and some recent results (Vasishth, 2003) involving Hindi center embeddings, including a principled account of individual variation in subject behavior.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In developing this approach, we argue that resource limitation in working memory is better defined as an artefact of very general constraints on information processing - specifically, rehearsal and activation - rather than as an inherent numerical bound on memory capacity (cf. (Gibson, 2000; Hawkins, 1994); also see Section 3.5).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> In the rest of this paper, we first introduce the ACT-R architecture. Then we present the results of several simulations of experiments available in the psycholinguistic literature. The paper concludes with a discussion of the potential advantages and shortcomings of this approach, and of the broader consequences of modeling parsing within a cognitive architecture.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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