Editing Parsing (section)

=== Psycholinguistics ===
In [[psycholinguistics]], parsing involves not just the assignment of words to categories (formation of ontological insights), but the evaluation of the meaning of a sentence according to the rules of syntax drawn by inferences made from each word in the sentence (known as [[connotation]]). This normally occurs as words are being heard or read.

Neurolinguistics generally understands parsing to be a function of working memory, meaning that parsing is used to keep several parts of one sentence at play in the mind at one time, all readily accessible to be analyzed as needed. Because the human working memory has limitations, so does the function of sentence parsing.<ref>Sandra H. Vos, Thomas C. Gunter, Herbert Schriefers & Angela D. Friederici (2001) Syntactic parsing and working memory: The effects of syntactic complexity, reading span, and concurrent load, Language and Cognitive Processes, 16:1, 65-103, DOI: 10.1080/01690960042000085</ref> This is evidenced by several different types of syntactically complex sentences that demonstrate potential issues for mental parsing of sentences.

The first, and perhaps most well-known, type of sentence that challenges parsing ability is the garden-path sentence. These sentences are designed so that the most common interpretation of the sentence appears grammatically faulty, but upon further inspection, these sentences are grammatically sound. Garden-path sentences are difficult to parse because they contain a phrase or a word with more than one meaning, often their most typical meaning being a different part of speech.<ref name="doi.org">Pritchett, B. L. (1988). Garden Path Phenomena and the Grammatical Basis of Language Processing. Language, 64(3), 539–576. https://doi.org/10.2307/414532</ref> For example, in the sentence, "the horse raced past the barn fell", raced is initially interpreted as a past tense verb, but in this sentence, it functions as part of an adjective phrase.<ref>{{cite book|author=Thomas G Bever |title= The cognitive basis for linguistic structures |date= 1970 | oclc= 43300456}}</ref> Since parsing is used to identify parts of speech, these sentences challenge the parsing ability of the reader.

Another type of sentence that is difficult to parse is an attachment ambiguity, which includes a phrase that could potentially modify different parts of a sentence, and therefore presents a challenge in identifying syntactic relationship (i.e. "The boy saw the lady with the telescope", in which the ambiguous phrase with the telescope could modify the boy saw or the lady.) <ref name="doi.org"/>

A third type of sentence that challenges parsing ability is center embedding, in which phrases are placed in the center of other similarly formed phrases (i.e. "The rat the cat the man hit chased ran into the trap".) Sentences with 2 or in the most extreme cases 3 center embeddings are challenging for mental parsing, again because of ambiguity of syntactic relationship.<ref>Karlsson, F. (2010). Working Memory Constraints on Multiple Center-Embedding. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 32. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4j00v1j2</ref>

Within neurolinguistics there are multiple theories that aim to describe how parsing takes place in the brain. One such model is a more traditional generative model of sentence processing, which theorizes that within the brain there is a distinct module designed for sentence parsing, which is preceded by access to lexical recognition and retrieval, and then followed by syntactic processing that considers a single syntactic result of the parsing, only returning to revise that syntactic interpretation if a potential problem is detected.<ref>Ferreira, F., & Clifton, C. (1986). The independence of syntactic processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 25(3), 348–368. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-596X(86)90006-9</ref> The opposing, more contemporary model theorizes that within the mind, the processing of a sentence is not modular, or happening in strict sequence. Rather, it poses that several different syntactic possibilities can be considered at the same time, because lexical access, syntactic processing, and determination of meaning occur in parallel in the brain. In this way these processes are integrated.<ref>Atlas, J. D. (1997). On the modularity of sentence processing: semantical generality and the language of thought. Language and Conceptualization, 213–214.</ref>

Although there is still much to learn about the neurology of parsing, studies have shown evidence that several areas of the brain might play a role in parsing. These include the left anterior temporal pole, the left inferior frontal gyrus, the left superior temporal gyrus, the left superior frontal gyrus, the right posterior cingulate cortex, and the left angular gyrus. Although it has not been absolutely proven, it has been suggested that these different structures might favor either phrase-structure parsing or dependency-structure parsing, meaning different types of parsing could be processed in different ways which have yet to be understood.<ref>Lopopolo, Alessandro, van den Bosch, Antal, Petersson, Karl-Magnus, and Roel M. Willems; Distinguishing Syntactic Operations in the Brain: Dependency and Phrase-Structure Parsing. Neurobiology of Language 2021; 2 (1): 152–175. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/nol_a_00029</ref>