ABSTRACT
The main medium for the acquisition of knowledge is probably verbal comprehension. The central importance of comprehension skill is recognized by our educational institutions, and therefore comprehension is often used as a criterion skill for measuring achievement and aptitude. In this chapter, we will report on our investigation of one aspect of verbal comprehension, namely, the mental processes that underlie sentence comprehension. Our research focuses on the information a person extracts from a sentence, on the internal representation of that information, and on the mental operations that are applied to the representation• Our aim is to specify the parameters of the information-processing system in simple comprehension tasks. We will validate our theoretical proposals by accounting for response latencies in a task where people decide whether a sentence is true or false. Then we will examine verbal comprehension in a number of other tasks, showing how the same fundamental processes are common to these various situations.
