Some Predictions of Optimality Theory on Sentence Processing, Grammaticality Perception, and Corpus Frequency*

The distinction between ‘grammatical ’ and ‘processing ’ factors determining our linguistic behaviour, which is one of the guiding assumptions in generative grammar since Chomsky (1957, 1965), is a very natural one. There is ample evidence that aspects of human cognition such as working memory constraints influence language processing even though they are no