ABSTRACT
In Chapter 5, we reviewed work on sen tence compre hen sion that was con cerned with investigat ing gram mat ical com pet ence in SLI. Vari ous hypo theses were con sidered, but they all had in com mon the notion that SLI was char ac terised by some deficiency in the child’s under lying gram matical rep resent a tions. This approach follows naturally from the Chomskyan tra dition, where grammatical know ledge is described in static terms. How ever, it com pletely ignores the way in which gram matical knowledge is deployed in real time when generat ing meaning from incom ing speech. This is an import ant lim it a tion, because there is ample evid ence that decod ing of grammatical struc ture does not wait until a whole sentence has been encountered. Rather, the identi fic a tion of the grammatical structure of a sentence (pars ing) takes place incrementally as each word is heard. Even if we are per fectly compet ent in the gram mar of our native language, com pre hen sion can break down if we over load the listener with sentences that are rapid and/or syntactic ally complex. Comprehension problems can res ult from per formance lim ita tions in a listener who can not sim ultan eously cope with the task of remember ing incom ing material while com put ing the mean ing of what has already been heard.
