Introduction

Abstract

The goal of this book is to contribute to the theory of the human sentence parser, through the study of sentence processing in Italian. The study will present experimental evidence on how people parse sentences. The framework in which the experiments have been conceived, analyzed and evaluated is characterized by (at least) the following hypotheses: that a speaker/hearer constructs an internal structural representation of the linguistic input and that such construction is aided by the use of parsing strategies that, though operating on a syntactic representation, are independent of the grammar and are psychologically motivated.