This article describes a left‐corner parser implemented within a cognitively and neurologically motivated distributed model of memory. This parser's approach to syntactic ambiguity points toward a tidy account both of surprisal effects and of locality effects, such as the parsing breakdowns caused by center embedding. The model provides an algorithmic‐level (Marr, 1982) account of these breakdowns: The structure of the parser's memory and the nature of incremental parsing produce a smooth degradation of processing accuracy for longer center embeddings, and a steeper degradation when they are nested, in line with recall observations by Miller and Isard (1964) and speed‐accuracy trade‐off observations by McElree et al. (2003). Modeling results show that this effect is distinct from the effects of ambiguity and exceeds the effect of mere sentence length.