Chapter 18 Sentence Processing

Human language comprehension is so effortless that it often appears instantaneous. Someone speaks, and we understand them without any awareness of how. It is only when we step back and examine the structure of language that it becomes clear just how complex this ability is. To understand speech, we must: transform the acoustic input into a phonological representation, identify each word that is spoken, integrate these words into a structured syntactic and semantic representation and use that representation to determine what the speaker intended to convey. Figure 1 illustrates these processes and how they might be connected. The field of sentence processing examines the processes that follow word identification—syntactic analysis, semantic interpretation, and pragmatic processing. Until recently there was little research that examined children's sentence processing. This was largely attributable to a lack of appropriate paradigms. Research on adult language comprehension had relied on reading paradigms, dual-task studies, and metalinguistic judgments of words or utterances. While these methods provided substantial insight into the mature processing system, the findings for young children were often murky and difficult to interpret. In the past fifteen years, however, new techniques have been widely adopted that allow us to study how children comprehend spoken language in fairly natural contexts.There are several reasons for studying children's sentence processing. First, it is a critical but poorly understood aspect of child development. By four or five years of age, children have mastered the basics of their native language and amassed an impressive vocabulary. But we know little about how they employ this knowledge as they are listening. Are young children able to understand sentences as rapidly as we do? Or is it wiser to slow down when we speak to them? Do they arrive at essentially the same interpretation as older children and adults? Or is our communication with children jeopardized by systematic differences in how we resolve linguistic ambiguity? Second, mapping the development of language processing can shed light on the role of language processing in developmental disorders For example, many high-functioning children with autism or attention deficit disorders have problems engaging in conversations or following instructions, despite average or even superior performance on standardized tests of lexical and grammatical abilities (Tager-Sensitive measures of online comprehension could allow us to explore whether these problems stem from core deficits in language processing, as opposed to deficits in pragmatic abilities, attention or motivation (see e. Snedeker, in press; chapter …