By some random Googling I found: E. Gibson, Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies, which proposes a model about how much working memory is needed to parse various kinds of syntactic structures, and claims to explain why center-embedding is hard.
It seems to be very popular (1315 citations in Google Scholar), I bet if you look at citing and related papers youl can find lots of discussion.
By some random Googling I found: E. Gibson, Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies, which proposes a model about how much working memory is needed to parse various kinds of syntactic structures, and claims to explain why center-embedding is hard.
It seems to be very popular (1315 citations in Google Scholar), I bet if you look at citing and related papers youl can find lots of discussion.