Trends in syntactic parsing: anticipation, Bayesian estimation, and good-enough parsing

• Anticipating future input is thought to play an important role in sentence interpretation.
• Comprehenders integrate prior knowledge with cues from the input to rank interpretations.
• Comprehenders may ignore syntax and base interpretation on default lexical associations.
• Syntactic structure representations are not underspecified.

Syntactic parsing processes establish dependencies between words in a sentence. These dependencies affect how comprehenders assign meaning to sentence constituents. Classical approaches to parsing describe it entirely as a bottom-up signal analysis. More recent approaches assign the comprehender a more active role, allowing the comprehender's individual experience, knowledge, and beliefs to influence his or her interpretation. This review describes developments in three related aspects of sentence processing research: anticipatory processing, Bayesian/noisy-channel approaches to sentence processing, and the ‘good-enough’ parsing hypothesis.