Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

syntactic structure obtained by the parsing procedure with semantics by applying some
sort of thematic relations assignment procedure. Parsers are usually based on a particular
linguistic theory, very often on Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard & Sag,
1994) due to the incorporation and making use of notions taken from computer science
(e.g. ‘knowledge representation’, a notion that is needed for processing and classification
of data in an information system; it is important for determining which aspect of data
should be taken into account; for example, in a series 31, 28, 31, 30, 31 one knows what
these data represent only if one knows that these are the numbers of days in the first five
months in a year). Parsers do not entirely rely only on grammatical information and are
usually in some aspect statistical – for example, they employ big corpora for training - or
probabilistic rules to determine what aspect of meaning should be taken from the lexicon.
In the broader sense language comprehension includes building a reconstruction of the
state of affairs described in the sentence (or sentences) where linguistic message is
viewed as a set of instructions to achieve this goal. Sometimes in the latter sense a term
sentence understanding is used (Garman, 1990) and it includes not only understanding of
the individual parts of the linguistic message, but
‘…takes account of general knowledge about the events and incorporates
elements that were not actually specified in the linguistic message (Garman, 1990:
305).
This account of sentence comprehension leads to the mental models or situation models
of sentence comprehension (Johnson-Laird, 1983, 1989, van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983,
Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998). This approach is psychologically more realistic and could
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