We propose a transition system for dependency parsing with a left-corner parsing strategy. Unlike parsers with conventional transition systems, such as arc-standard or arc-eager, a parser with our system correctly predicts the processing difficulties people have, such as of center-embedding. We characterize our transition system by comparing its oracle behaviors with those of other transition systems on treebanks of 18 typologically diverse languages. A crosslinguistical analysis confirms the universality of the claim that a parser with our system requires less memory for parsing naturally occurring sentences.