A PROMISING MODEL OF SENTENCE CONSTRUAL
Book Review of Gernsbacher on Language-Comprehension

Abstract

Gernsbacher's Structure Building Framework (1990) provides an experimentally grounded and theoretically rich account of how people arrive at global representations of discourse meaning from the evidence presented in sequentially ordered clauses. Gernsbacher's model explains both what is present and what is absent in the interpretation arrived at, with special attention paid to shifts from substructure to substructure when the language comprehender constructs a global interpretation of input. Gaps in Gernsbacher's handling of some aspects of sentence complexity, such as heavy nominals and thematic contrasts, and in her discussion of some of the competing accounts of sentence comprehending, do not undermine the value of this important contribution to the field of psycholinguistics.

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References

• Fodor, J.A. (1983) The modularity of mind: an essay on faculty psychology. A Bradford Book, MIT Press.
• Gernsbacher, M.A. (1992) Precis of: Language Comprehension as Structure Building. PSYCOLOQUY 3(69) language-comprehension.1.gernsbacher.
• Gernsbacher, M.A. (1990) Language Comprehension as Structure Building. Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.