ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author focuses on the problem of reading and draws on insights and analogies from work in Natural Language Parsing and Continuous Speech Understanding. He provides to make the case that the process of arriving at an interpretation of the input involves the formation and evaluation of many alternative partial hypotheses about the input and that this process goes on largely below the level of introspective awareness of the perceiver. High-level perceptual tasks such as reading, speech understanding, and visual scene interpretation are characterized by the need to discover a structured interpretation that accounts for the stimuli present. In the case of speech understanding, a theory can range from an elementary hypothesis that a particular word is present at a particular point in the input to a complete hypothesis of a covering sequence of words with a complete syntactic and semantic interpretation.
