This book attempts to integrate symbolic processing, in the form of minimalism, with connectionism. Minimalism represents sentences as symbolic structures resulting from a formal process of syntactic derivation. Connectionism, on the other hand, represents sentences as patterns of association between linguistic features. These patterns are said to obey statistical regularities of linguistic usage instead of formal linguistic rules. The authors of the book argue that human sentence processing displays both structural and statistical characteristics and therefore requires the integration of the two views.