A Bottom-Up Parsing Model of Local Coherence Effects

Human sentence processing occurs incrementally. Most mod-els of human processing rely on parsers that always build con-nected tree structures. But according to the theory of Good Enough parsing (Ferreira & Patson, 2007), humans parse sen-tences using small chunks of local information, not always forming a globally coherent parse. This difference is appar-ent in the study of local coherence effects (Tabor, Galantucci, & Richardson, 2004), wherein a locally plausible interpreta-tion interferes with the correct global interpretation of a sen-tence. We present a model that accounts for these effects using a wide-coverage parser that captures the idea of Good Enough parsing. Using Combinatory Categorial Grammar, our parser works bottom-up, enforcing the use of local information only. Wemodel the difficulty of processing a sentence in terms of the probability of a locally coherent reading relative to the prob-ability of the globally coherent reading of the sentence. Our model successfully predicts psycholinguistic results