Manuscript dated December14, 1998; comments welcome. Please do not cite or quote without permission.

Do people incrementally incorporate the meaning of quantifier expressions to understand an unfolding sentence? Most previous studies concluded that quantifiers do not immediately influence how a sentence is understood based on the observation that online N400-effects differed from offline plausibility judgments. Those studies, however, used serial visual presentation (SVP), which involves unnat...

Like many natural cognitive processes, the process of sentence comprehension involves the simultaneous consideration of a large number of different sources of information. In this chapter, we consider one aspect of sentence comprehension: the assignment of the constituents of a sentence to the correct thematic case roles. Case role assignment is not, of. course, all there is to comprehension, b...

Language comprehension involves activating word meanings and integrating them with the sentence context. This study examined whether these routines are carried out even when they are theoretically unnecessary, namely, in the case of opaque idiomatic expressions, for which the literal word meanings are unrelated to the overall meaning of the expression. Predictable words in sentences were replac...

Electrophysiological studies consistently find N400 effects of semantic incongruity in nonnative (L2) language comprehension. These N400 effects are often delayed compared with native (L1) comprehension, suggesting that semantic integration in one's second language occurs later than in one's first language. In this study, we investigated whether such a delay could be attributed to (1) intraling...

The comprehension of natural and synthetic speech in Swedish and American English was investigated using a sentence-by-sentence listening paradigm. The synthesized speech was generated by the KTH text-to-speech systems. Results indicated that sentence listening times were signzficantly longer only for American English synthetic speech as compared to natural speech. Text dijjjculty was found to ...

When a sentence is understood, the reader or listener must have constructed a mental representation of the situation described by the sentence. The model presented here views sentence comprehension as the construction of such a ‘situational representation’. The model consists of a simple recurrent neural network that transforms word sequences (i.e., sentences) into representations of the corres...

This study investigates the neuro-cognitive mechanisms employed to monitor and resolve conflicts between competing sentential representations during sentence comprehension. Participants took part in a sentence comprehension task as well as the flanker and the color-word Stroop tasks while their brain activities were scanned with fMRI. Medial superior frontal gyrus (mSFG), left inferior frontal ...

Comprehension emerges as the results of inference and strategic processes that support the construction of a coherent mental model for a text. However, the vast majority of comprehension skills tests adopt a format that does not afford an assessment of these processes as they operate during reading. This study assessed the viability of the Reading Strategy Assessment Tool (RSAT), which is an au...

UNLABELLED Functional imaging studies have demonstrated involvement of the anterior temporal cortex in sentence comprehension. It is unclear, however, whether the anterior temporal cortex is essential for this function. We studied two aspects of sentence comprehension, namely syntactic and prosodic comprehension in temporal lobe epilepsy patients who were candidates for resection of the anterio...