摘要：Natural languages differ in the directionality of their syntactic build-up, developing from the phrasal head or matrix clause in either a left-branching direction or a right-branching direction. Japanese, for example, is quite consistently left-branching, while English is generally right-branching. We argue that the purported greater complexity of left-branching sentences arises from a confusion of analytical syntactic structure with sentence processing mechanisms, and we propose a model based upon the Chalmers' Combinatorial-State Automaton (CSA) which we suggest more nearly approximates actual neural processes. Our model, a Nested Combinatorial-States Automaton (NCA), can be constrained to require only finite memory resources, and assumes that the greater part of sentence processing occurs at the lexical level
关键词：natural language processing; psycholinguistics; finite automata
