ABSTRACT
The comprehension of speech is clearly an integrative process. In fact, such a statement seems so self-evident as to be nearly tautologous; to understand an utterance we must, in some fashion, retrieve information about the words in that utterance, discover the structural relationship and semantic properties of those words, and interpret these in the light of the various pragmatic and discourse constraints operating at the time. Further, all of this takes place at a remarkably rapid pace, a fact (among several others) that has led a number of theorists to characterize the comprehension system in general as being a contextually determined or "top down" process, a system that allows all temporally previous information to affect the analysis of new information at any point in its procesing, thus providing maximally rapid processing and in~erpretation of new sensory information. Some impressive empirical work demonstrating the very rapid effects of certain "higher" order information sources upon the processing of "lower" order information has recently provided some important substantiation for this position (see, in particular, Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 1980).
