ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the processes involved in comprehending clauses, sentences, and text. Evidence that the clause plays an active role in comprehension comes from several sources. Fodor and Bever pioneered a technique for studying speech perception in which listeners hear a sentence into which an extraneous click dubbed. There is evidence from speech comprehension experiments for an extra wrap up at the ends of sentences. The experiments just described all use speech comprehension, but there is converging evidence from work on reading for the importance of clauses and sentences. Further evidence for moment-to-moment decoding comes from experiments looking at the comprehension of ambiguous sentences. Psycholinguists, highly literate members of a highly literate culture, took the comprehension of explicit text to be the norm, whereas from an evolutionary or sociolinguistic perspective it is the exception. It is only with an effort that psycholinguists are coming to understand the process of language comprehension as it must occur in all natural, conversational settings.
