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A plausible explanation is that locality preferences such as this arise in the service of minimizing memory costs\u2014more distant sentential material is more difficult to reactivate than more recent material. Note that processing any sentence requires linking each new lexical item with material in the current parse. This often involves the construction of long\u2010distance dependencies. Under a resource\u2010limited view of language processing, lengthy integrations should induce difficulty even in unambiguous sentences. To date there has been little direct quantitative evidence in support of this perspective. This article presents 2 self\u2010paced reading studies, which explore the hypothesis that dependency distance is a fundamental determinant of reading complexity in unambiguous constructions in English. The evidence suggests that the difficulty associated with integrating a new input item is heavily determined by the amount of lexical material intervening between the input item and the site of its target dependents. The patterns observed here are not straightforwardly accounted for within purely experience\u2010based models of complexity. Instead, this work supports the role of a memory bottleneck in language comprehension. This constraint arises because hierarchical linguistic relations must be recovered from a linear input stream.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1207\/s15516709cog0000_7","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2005,2,28]],"date-time":"2005-02-28T16:45:10Z","timestamp":1109609110000},"page":"261-290","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1002\/crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":266,"title":["Consequences of the Serial Nature of Linguistic Input for Sentenial Complexity"],"prefix":"10.1111","volume":"29","author":[{"given":"Daniel","family":"Grodner","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Edward","family":"Gibson","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"311","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2005,3]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_2_1_2_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1006\/jmla.1997.2562"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_3_1","volume-title":"The architecture of cognition.","author":"Anderson J. 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