ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about lexical ambiguity, and syntactic ambiguity is the other great source of ambiguity and difficulty in understanding language. Some sentences are permanently ambiguous in that we get to the end of them and we can't resolve the ambiguity without additional information. The goal of language understanding isn't to construct a syntactic representation but to use that in the short term to extract the meaning of the sentence. Language serves many functions, from communicating to assisting thought, from play to maintaining social contact, often we speak because we want to have some effect on our listeners. As we construct the propositional network, we might come across some contradictions, but these are resolved by a process of spreading activation and competition. The chapter focuses on the consequences of damage to the right hemisphere of the brain, which leads to an impairment to the ability to follow connected discourse without an impairment to recognising words or parsing sentences.
