Experimental and theoretical psycholinguists report their research into the on-line recovery from errors in sentence comprehension while reading, a new focus of research in the field that has yet to establish much in the way of consensus. Earlier research concentrated on first-pass parsing, but here the concern is with the mechanisms by which the mind discovers it has turned down a dead alley and finds its way back to where it went wrong. The 11 studies consider prosodic influences on reading syntactically ambiguous sentences, reanalysis aspects of movements, sentence reanalysis and visibility, limited repair parsing, a computational model of recovery, parsing as incremental restructuring, and generalized monotonicity for reanalysis models. Accessible, at least at the second go-round, to graduate and advanced undergraduate students, and researchers in psycholinguistics; perhaps also of interest to people in the cognitive sciences as an example of how the mind mends itself on the run. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
The process of on-line recovery from errors in sentence comprehension is a new and lively focus of research activity in psycholinguistics. This volume offers chapters by experimental and theoretical psycholinguists who have been moving this research forward, sometimes in agreement with each other, sometimes developing opposing views. The experimental data and explanations presented here will interest linguists and psychologists, and all those concerned with how language is used, so rapidly and effectively, for communication. Language understanding is one of the foundational areas of cognitive science, and the research represented here may illuminate how the human mind is able to perform running repairs on its own computations. The material can be read with interest by graduate students and advanced undergraduates as well as practicing researchers.
