Introduction

The topics of how people produce and comprehend sentences and how they learn to do so have played a central role in the development of cognitive psychology and cognitive science. Demonstrations of the utter inadequacy of behavioral theory to deal with language comprehension, production, and acquisition (e.g., Chomsky, 1959; Miller, Galanter, & Pribram, 1960) led to its demise and fueled the cognitive revolution (Gardner, 1985; Johnson-Laird, 1988). A decade later, psycholinguistics was one of the core topics addressed by the new interdisciplinary field of cognitive science (Stillings et al., 1987). One reason that the psycholinguistics of sentence processing has played such a central role is the importance of language to the human state: How is it that we are so outstandingly successful at using language, given all our other inadequacies? Another reason is that the topic of sentence processing has proved to be a field that specialists in cognitive psychology, linguistics, computer science, and philosophy (and undoubtedly other disciplines) can study from their own perspective. In addition, it has proved to be a field in which researchers in one discipline can profit from the insights provided by researchers in the other disciplines.