ABSTRACT
Even a cursory consideration of language comprehension is likely to lead to several conclusions about the psychological processes underlying comprehension. Perhaps most notably, comprehension is remarkably rapid, occurring essentially in “real time.” Furthermore, despite its rapidity (and despite our intuitions to the contrary), comprehension is not instantaneous, but is instead a continuous process distributed over time. And if one assumes that formal descriptions of language provide even a rough approximation of the informational types and representations that are functionally involved in comprehension, then language comprehension must involve multiple levels of analysis (e.g., phonological, lexical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic). The results of these multileveled analyses are then somehow integrated into a single coherent interpretation with incredible rapidity. Finally, these processes occur largely outside of our conscious awareness, and indeed remain (for the most part) inaccessible to consciousness.
