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The central issue of the theory of syntactic processing is universality of principles the processor 1, short for the human sentence processing mechanism, employs. This amounts to the strongest position according to which the processor is completely universal, and all it needs is the grammar of a particular languages to be fully operational. In the case of unambiguous sentences, the processor simply applies the grammar to analyze them. In the case of ambiguous sentences, when the grammar presents different choices, the processor applies the universal processing principles like Late Closure (LC). If so, then we can hypothesize about the architecture of the processor by finding out what its preferences are when the grammar gives it a choice.

Universality of LC implies that applies equally in all languages. But if one finds differences between languages with respect to how they are processed when there is no explaining difference in the grammar of the language, it will be a challenge to the notion of the universal processor. Recently, numerous experimental studies have challenged the universality of the LC strategy initially tested in English.