Chapter 9: Understanding Sentence Structure and Meaning

9.1 Incremental Processing and the Problem of Ambiguity

• “Garden path” sentences
• Box 9.1: Key grammatical terms and concepts in English
• Measuring processing difficulty
• Language at Large 9.1: Crash blossoms run amok in newspaper headlines
• Method 9.1: Using reading times to detect misanalysis
• 9.1 Questions to Contemplate

9.2 Models of Ambiguity Resolution

• The garden path theory
• Box 9.2: Two common psychological heuristics
• The constraint-based approach
• Box 9.3: Not all reduced relatives lead to processing implosions
• 9.2 Questions to Contemplate

9.3 Variables That Predict the Difficulty of Ambiguous Sentences

• Thematic relations associated with verbs
• The syntactic frames of verbs
• Frequency-based information
• Researchers at Work 9.1: Subliminal priming of a verb's syntactical frame
• The importance of context
• Box 9.4: Doesn't intonation disambiguate spoken language?
• Humans parse language despite rampant ambiguity
• 9.3 Questions to Contemplate

9.4 Making Predictions

• Eyeing the content yet to come
• Brain waves reveal predictive processing
• Predictions in language and hockey: A matter of expertise
• 9.4 Questions to Contemplate

9.5 When Memory Fails

• Memory failure or faulty predictions?
• Case markers as disentanglers: A Russian lesson
• 9.5 Questions to Contemplate

9.6 Variable Minds

• Individual differences in memory span
• Differences in cognitive control
• Box 9.5: The language experience of bookworms versus socialites
• Effects of cognitive training
• Box 9.6: How does aging affect sentence comprehension?
• Language at Large 9.2: A psycholinguist walks into a bar...
• 9.6 Questions to Contemplate
• Digging Deeper: The great debate over the “bilingual advantage”

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