Language Comprehension and Sentence Meaning

Study Notes

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 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 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 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.