“Hale is a genuine computational psycholinguist: a rare type of cognitive scientist who uses computational models of language processing to explain what sorts of structures are hard and easy for humans to produce and/or comprehend. In this monograph, he presents the formal foundations underlying this type of research, drawing on results in computer science, linguistics, psychology, and information theory. The presentation is clear and systematic, making this an extremely useful book for scholars in one of these fields seeking to understand work in this highly interdisciplinary area.”

Tom Wasow, Stanford University