Sentence Processing (Current Issues in the Psychology of Language)

What are the psychological processes involved in comprehending sentences? How do we process the structure of sentences and how do we understand their meaning? Do children, bilinguals and people with language impairments process sentences in the same way as healthy monolingual adults? These are just some of the many questions that sentence processing researchers have tried to answer by conducting ever more sophisticated experiments, making this one of the most productive and exciting areas in experimental language research in recent years.

This book is the first to provide a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of this important field. It contains 10 chapters written by world-leading experts, which discuss influential theories of sentence processing and important experimental evidence, with a focus on recent developments in the area. The chapters also analyse research that has investigated how people process the structure and meaning of sentences, and how sentences are understood within their context.

This comprehensive and authoritative work will appeal to students and researchers in the field of sentence processing, as well anyone with an interest in psychology and linguistics.

Roger P. G. van Gompel is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Dundee, UK. His research interests are the psychological processes underlying language production and comprehension, with a special interest in sentence processing. He has published research articles on discourse and sentence processing and has written several reviews of the literature on sentence comprehension.