ABSTRACT
Reading, as well as listening to spoken language, requires one not only to identify words but to determine the relationships among the words and use these relationships to compose the meaning of a sentence out of the meanings of its words. Since its inception, one of the main tasks of psycholinguistics has been to fathom how a reader can determine how the words in a sentence are related to one another. One psycholinguistic tradition, dating back at least to Miller (1962), emphasizes the role grammatical knowledge plays in this process. The present chapter falls squarely in this tradition. It presents some contemporary evidence, drawn from the comprehension of English and Italian sentences, about one of the oldest topics in psycholinguistics: the processing of sentences whose words occur in an order that is different from the canonical, deep structure, order.
