ABSTRACT
There is a well-established tradition in linguistics and in certain fields of psycholinguistics that the study of language comprehension should employ sentences presented without discourse or social context (e.g., see Glucksberg, 2001). That is, participants presented with a target sentence such as, “The night sky was filled with drops of molten silver” (1), might be asked to rate whether the sentence is syntactically correct, semantically meaningful, easy to comprehend, or literally true. What is surprising about this tradition, at least from my perspective (see Katz 1996b), is that as natural language processors, humans never encounter sentences out of either discourse or cultural context. Discourse context refers to the characteristics about the language in which a sentence, such as (1), is embedded, cultural context refers to factors such as the shared beliefs between speaker and listener(s), conventions shared between writer and reader, or, in a more general sense, the beliefs that surround who the speaker is, who the listener is, and the environment in which Speaker X makes an utterance to Listener Y (see Clark, 1996).
