Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

How people comprehend language is one of the central questions in psycholinguistics.
Some facts are well established: the process of language comprehension is fast, at least in
the most instances automatic and beyond the control of the listener. This constitutes an
obvious obstacle for the research: while we can have direct access to the results of the
process (correct answers to questions, for example), we have no direct insight into the
process itself.
Linguistic account of language does not suffice for research into language
comprehension. It can provide detailed descriptions of the abstract language systems and
make claims about universal traits of human languages. However, in the mainstream of
linguistic research the quest for the universal traits of all languages is closely associated
with the work of Joseph Greenberg (Greenberg, 1963, Comrie, 1981) and, roughly,
consists of comparing hundreds of world languages to find what is common between
them. The alternative approach to the language universals emerged with the formulation
of generative grammar (Chomsky, 1957, 1965) and with the idea that the universal traits
of human languages are the ones that depend on our innate language structures or general
architecture of human brain. Therefore, this approach in linguistics offers a linguistic
account of the language comprehension and production, language learning and language
acquisition. Although today an informed reader could easily see that Chomsky was plain
wrong in questions of language innateness (for thorough account of ‘innateness
hypothesis’ and related generativist claims see Sampson, 2002, 2005), his ideas, in fact,
gave impetus to psycholinguistic research, in the first place into language acquisition.
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