Experiments on human incremental parsing

Experiments have been conducted in which the subjects incrementally constructed dependency trees of Russian sentences. The subject was successively presented with growing initial segments of a sentence, and had to draw syntactic links between the last word of the segment and the previous words. The subject was also shown a limited right context – a fixed number of words following the last word of the segment. The results of the experiments show that the right context of 1 or 2 words is sufficient for confident incremental parsing of Russian narrative sentences.