ABSTRACT
It’s my experience that many students find the study of how we understand sentences to be the most difficult and least interesting part of psycholinguistics. And, I must now shamefully admit, I know what they mean. I think there are three difficulties with the work discussed in this chapter. First, there are many technical terms (e.g. “reduced relative”, “relative clause”), and I find it difficult remembering what they all mean. Second, many of the materials used in the experiments in this area strike me as artificial and unnatural – not at all the sort of thing we use in real life. And third, related to this point, I wonder what the more general point of it all is. Obviously we can process reduced relatives (we’ll come to what they are later), but why does it matter? Some researchers are very interested in them, but it strikes me as a very specialist topic – almost like train spotting (no offence intended), and not at all the sort of thing a wide-ranging scholar would spend too long on. So writing this chapter is a special quest for me: to minimise the number of technical terms and make them memorable; to discover if we are really troubled by these sorts of sentences in real life; and to discover if this work tells us anything more general about how the mind works.
