Psychological Processes in Sentence Comprehension. Final Report.

This report summarizes two years of research by a team at the University of Austin, aimed at developing and testing a model of sentence comprehension. The general model that has guided the work maintains that, on the basis of cues available in a sentence's surface form, the hearer projects hypotheses about the grammatical relations and semantic content that underly the sentence. Separate sections of the report discuss research related to the nature of the surface cues and to the ways such cues are used during comprehension; the processing of ambiguous sentences; and the comprehension of idioms, which pose a number of linguistically and psycholinguistically interesting problems. Specific experimental data are reported in a series of extensive appendixes. (AA)