Syntactic Processing: An Overview

This book provides an overview of the structures, topics and main theories of syntactic processing. It covers the last 40 years of sentence-level psycholinguistic research and debates and makes it accessible to both theoretical linguists and experimental psychologists.

Tying linguistically relevant issues to psycholinguistic theory, this book:

• Covers the processing of the grammatical phenomena adjunction, agreement and gap filling and discusses the relationship between grammars and parsers
• Discusses experimental work and theories, demonstrating how psychologists have made real strides in understanding language and how studying the processing of syntactic structure is the same as studying the nature of language
• Explores the key theories of psycholinguistics, including recent developments
• Explains the different methodologies of sentence processing, such as eye-tracking and electroencephalography

Bridging the gap between psycholinguistic research and the study of language, this book is essential reading for advanced students and scholars of linguistics and experimental psycholinguistics as well as cognitive science and psychology.

Carlos Acuña-Fariña is Full Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. He is the author of top-tier research of a theoretical kind in linguistics and of an experimental kind in both psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. The latter has been done using the methodologies of self-paced reading, eye-tracking and electroencephalography and has mostly covered the topics discussed in this book: relative clause adjunction ambiguities, agreement, gap filling and the relationship between grammars and parsers.