r - - I 6 Sentence Processing Merrill

It is commonplace and perfectly correct to speak of language as the "glue" that holds human society together, that links past and future in a social . intellectual, and legal tradition . No other behavioral capacity is more central to our individual comfort and success in society . That capacity depends upon an incredibly complex set of cognitive systems, served by a set of motor and perceptual skills that are elaborately developed and delicately timed. Every day a normal human being utters thousands of words in the form of sentences and conversational fragments and listens to twice that number more. Every such word must be identified from an ensemble of 50,000 or more forms in less than a third of a second and assembled into a structure that correctly represents the meaning intended by the speaker. Moreover, the processes that eventuate in this association of meaning and utterance form are accomplished in major part without the conscious attention or intention of the speaker or listener . These are the global facts of language use. The linguistic sciences comprise the technical fields that inquire into this process and are responsible for the study of the informational structures, the memory and processing systems, and the neurological and physiological functions that support