Reading In Different Languages: Is There A Universal Mechanism For Parsing Sentences?

Across the world there are about 5,000 distinct languages and many more variations in dialect. The Cambridge encyclopedia of language (Crystal, 1987) gives brief details of about a thousand of these languages and more detailed surveys have been compiled by Voegelin and Voegelin (1977), Comrie (1981, 1987), Ruhlen (1987), and others.