ABSTRACT
Recent research on parsing has provided a salubrious injection of syntax into our theories of comprehension. After a period in which the study of comprehension became closely identified with the analysis of higher level textual processes and in which syntactic processes typically were assumed to be either inscrutable or irrelevant, it is again credible to claim that comprehension depends in part on processes that are essentially syntactic. In parallel, after a period in which the concept of reading ability seemed to collapse around concepts of knowledge-based reasoning, use of schemata and the like, it is again reasonable to argue that reading ability, as opposed to adaptive intelligence, is largely a matter of narrow linguistic abilities rather than broadly cognitive ones (see Perfetti, 1989).
