ABSTRACT
Lexical identification of written or spoken words is only the starting point of understanding language. Post-lexical comprehension processes operate in a similar way for spoken and written material, despite the differences in mode of presentation and the different cues that they provide. Comprehension involves more than parsing individual sentences. Parsing occurs as the words of a sentence are being recognized. Parsing generally proceeds without taking the meaning of the sentence into account. Sentences generally have to be related to one another and/or to knowledge of the world if they are to be properly understood. The process of text comprehension therefore consists of connecting these propositional representations into a coherent mental model. There is considerable debate about the role of inferences in text comprehension. It is more likely, therefore, that only a small number of inferences are made at the time that a sentence is originally processed.
