Language Processing

This chapter looks at language processing, focusing in particular on how humans decode, or understand, the language that they hear or read in real-time, actual instances of language use.
Analyses of language processing have com from several applied fields within linguistics.
Among the topics studied by researchers in the field of psycholinguistics is the ease with which humans can decode different types of sentence structures. Among those studied by reserchers in the field of discourse analysis is how readers process extended passages of written text. The phenomena that researchers in these fields might attempt to analyze include the following.

(1) A newspaper reader is confused by the headline Democrats Urge President Not to Veto Ban.
(2) The sentence The old man was hit by the blue car is easier for a group of subjects to understand than the sentence The green car was hit by the blue car, even though both are in passive voice.
(3) You are reading experimental reports in a scientific journal and notice that they all use the same headings : Introduction, Method, Results, and Discussion.

Observation (1) illustrates the fact that some sentence structures are easier to process than others, at least in isolation. Observation (2) suggests that syntactic structure alone does not account for all observations about sentence processing. Observation (3) indicates that readers rely on structural cues to help them process longer texts. What we will now do is articulate the principles that will accout for these observations and some others related to language processing.혼자 독해하기 좀 벅차네요.
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