Sentence Processing

Abstract

Sentence processing is the study of the cognitive and neural processes that allow humans to comprehend multi‐word linguistic messages by combining the meanings of individual words compositionally into an interpretation that typically extends beyond the meanings of the individual words of the sentence. This process is arguably the signature property of human language; without this ability, we would possess merely an ability to send and receive one‐word signals, something that is not unusual in the animal world. This chapter reviews the essential theoretical assumptions and challenges of the field of sentence processing research, along with classic and recent findings concerning the cognitive and neural mechanisms that serve sentence processing.