Experiments on human incremental parsing of English

Abstract

Experiments have been carried out in which human subjects incrementally constructed dependency trees of English sentences. The subjects were successively presented with growing initial segments of a sentence, and had to draw syntactic links between the last word of the segment and the previous words. They were also shown a fixed number of lookahead words following the last word of the segment. The results of the experiments show that lookahead of 1 or 2 words is sufficient for confident incremental parsing of English declarative sentences.