A survey of studies in sentence perception : 1970-1976

'The fundamental problem in psycholinguistics is simple to formulate: what happens when we understand sentences?' (Johnson-Laird, 143). 'The problem of when and how a sentence is understood is, in my view, the central problem of experimental psycholinguistics' (Gough, 109). 'How do we understand the relevant meaning of sentences used in ordinary contexts? This is a central problem in psychology and a primary preoccupation of the psycholinguist' (Tanenhaus et al. 244). These and many similar statements in the literature place the problem of sentence understanding at the very centre of psycholinguistics. The construction of a theory of sentence understanding is apparently expected to have spin-offs in various directions: the theory of language production, of language acquisition; it might even benefit cognitive psychology as a whole. What, then, is the aim of a theory of sentence understanding? At this point authors are much less in agreement, or at least less explicit. In the early sixties the more or less implicit aim of constructing a theory of sentence understanding was to demonstrate the 'psychological reality' of linguistic notions, especially those developed in transformational linguistics. It is understandable in that light that such a theory was expected to stimulate developments in other areas of psycholinguistics as well. It is still an explicit purpose of many studies in language understanding to find out whether linguistic units are also relevant units in language processing. It has become abundantly clear, however, that proving 'psychological reality' of linguistic units and structures is too limited an aim for a theory of sentence understanding. Fodor et al. (80) convincingly show that reality studies have had only limited success. There is no doubt that such linguistic units and structures as words, constituents, and clauses show up in various experimental results; but generative rules, especially transformations, do not characterize processes of understanding. A major aim for a theory of