Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

Figure 2. Friederici’s model of sentence comprehension (based on Friederici,
2002)
In some details the model proposed in 2002 differs from the earlier version in which the
claim ‘syntax first’ was stronger (Friederici, 1995). According to this earlier version two
of the three phases are related to syntax: the first phase that corresponds to the first sweep
of the parser, i.e. the initial building of the syntactic structure, and the third phase, that
corresponds to the reanalysis and repair. The strong syntactocentric claim about the
comprehension processes consists in the ‘autonomy of syntax’ view: no other processes
contribute to the initial syntactic structure building and these processes precede other,
semantic processes that occur in the second phase. In the third phase the parser maps the
initial syntactic structure onto the available lexical/semantic information. In this phase an
interaction between syntactic and semantic information might happen, but not before. In
the 2002 model other non-linguistic processes are recognized too.
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