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Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

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Figure 1. The process of sentence comprehension (based on Garman, 1990 and<br />

Cutler & Clifton, 1999)<br />

The elements of the comprehension process – auditory and visual perception, linguistic<br />

processing (phonological, lexical, morphosyntactic), memory, knowledge – are not<br />

disputable. However, how they contribute to sentence comprehension is still left to<br />

various explanations.<br />

There are two general approaches to the explanation of the notion of sentence<br />

comprehension. In the narrow sense it is simply a reconstruction of the meaning of the<br />

sentence from its parts in the processes that are called parsing and interpretation.<br />

Research in the area of parsing is approached mainly from the computational linguistics.<br />

It is defined as an analysis of the continuous stream of input in order to determine its<br />

grammatical structure. In computer science parser is a program that carries out this task.<br />

The output of the parsing procedure is some sort of data structure that has a hierarchical<br />

organization represented usually as a tree or with appropriate bracketing (in difference<br />

with the input, which is a stream of data). Interpretation is a procedure that links the<br />

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