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.