Earticle

In the sentence showing garden path effects, the parser experiences reprocessing or backtracking. In any domain where performance is fluent it will be necessary to invoke a “principle of least commitment”, which is a principle that stops one from doing things you’ll later regret and so have to undo (Marr 1982). It is still possible that we apply a missing argument process once or twice in the target clause, though it is costly to retrack to search for its filler. However, the former is preferred to the latter, which is accordance with the fact that the former processing load is lower than the latter one. However, when the processing load is too heavy, the sentence is semantically incongruous. The backtracking limitation arises when the processing load for handling a sentence with a long-distance dependency gets too heavy. The difficulty in parsing this kind of sentence is related to memory constraints. When we apply missing argument process more than twice in the target clause, the sentence make no sense semantically since performance limitations prevent creation of such a tricky structure, though we have the competence to create such structures.