Case Study in Information Processing: Sentence Processing

An understanding of natural language processing may have direct contributions to make to a more general understanding of mental functioning, and in turn might impact on the development of artificial systems for information processing. Information processing is the central focus of cognitive science, and developments in our understanding of how information is handled in mental activity might provide useful guidelines for other areas. The purpose of this paper is to describe two general operating principles which appear to be implemented in the human language processor. These are the division of mental activity into distinct processing domains, and a restriction on the type of information that is initially available in the analysis of a language input.