Language Comprehension and Sentence Meaning

Language Comprehension

• To comprehend a sentence, we need to recognize the words, their syntactic relations, and the relation between each sentence and its meaning.
• We build mental structures of sentence meaning, starting from local levels of words and sentences to global units in extended discourse.
• We not only rely on explicitly stated meanings but also infer implicit or implied meanings.
• Words can have multiple meanings and can be used in literal and non-literal ways, such as in metaphors and irony.

Word Recognition

• Word recognition involves both verbal and visual recognition of words.
• The lexicon is the entire set of mental representations of words, like a mental dictionary.
• Word representations are networks comprising three major components: spelling, sound, and meaning.
• When we hear a word, we first respond to its phonology, then identify its distinct features to make sense of it.

Discourse Comprehension

• Discourse is a group of sentences combined in a meaningful manner.
• Beaugrande (1981) suggested seven criteria for a written or spoken text to qualify as a discourse:
  • Cohesion: grammatical relationship between sentence parts
  • Coherence: order of statements and how they relate to each other
  • Intentionality: whether the message is conveyed deliberately
  • Acceptability: whether the audience approves the communicative product
  • Informativeness: whether new information is added
  • Situationality: circumstances in which the remark is made
  • Intertextuality: refers to the outside world or interpretation of schemata
• Discourse comprehension requires making inferences to connect ideas both within and across local and global discourse structures.

Reading Speed and Comprehension

• Reading speed and comprehension are influenced by linguistic cues, reader characteristics, and context.
• Lexical cues, such as connectors and anaphors, help establish coherence among discourse elements.
• Reader characteristics, such as individual differences in perception, memory capacities, language ability, goals, and prior knowledge, are crucial in making sense of the discourse.
• Knowledge about a particular text aids comprehension, and insufficient knowledge limits comprehension.