Perspective on the Psycholinguistic Results

The clause-final verbal clusters in Dutch and German (and in general, in West Germanic languages) has been extensively studied in different syntactic theories. Standard Dutch prefers crossed dependencies (between verbs and their arguments) while Standard German prefers nested dependencies. Recently Bach, Brown, and Marslen-Wilson (1986) have investigated the consequences of these differences between Dutch and German for the processing complexity of sentences, containing either crossed or nested dependencies. Stated very simply, their results show that Dutch is 'easier ' than German, thus showing that the push-down automaton (PDA) cannot be the universal basis for the human parsing mechanism. They provide an explanation for the inadequacy of PDA in terms of the kinds of partial interpretations the dependencies allow the listener to construct. Motivated by their results and their discussion of these results we introduce a principle of partial interpretation (PPI) and present an automaton, embedded push-down automaton (EPDA) which permits processing of crossed and nested dependencies consistent with PPI. We show that there are appropriate complexity measures (motivated by the discussion in Bach, Brown, and Marslen-Wilson (1986) according to which the processing of crossed dependencies is easier than the processing of nested dependencies. Thi