ABSTRACT
A fundamental goal of psycholinguistic research is to understand the architectures and mechanisms that underlie language comprehension. Such an account entails an understanding of the representation and organization of linguistic knowledge in the mind and a theory of how that knowledge is used dynamically to recover the interpretation of the utterances we encounter. While research in theoretical and computational linguistics has demonstrated the tremendous complexities of language understanding, our intuitive experience of language is rather different. For the most part people understand the utterances they encounter effortlessly and accurately. In constructing models of how people comprehend language, we are thus presented with what we dub the performance paradox: How is it that people understand language so effectively given such complexity and ambiguity?
