Enduring themes in sentence comprehension:

Abstract

This chapter reviews evidence for LAST (Late Assignment of Syntax Theory), an architecture that integrates habit-based strategies and rule-based grammar into a model of comprehension. According to the author, comprehension is highly structured, incremental, and interactive and linguistic habits project representations at various levels simultaneously. Comprehenders do form linguistic structures, but the projection of structure may arise from either semantic or structural information. Townsend argues for the “multiple representation hypothesis,” which states that semantic information does not actually facilitate structural processing, but rather draws attention away from structural processing. Projected structures are checked against grammatically generated structures in the course of language comprehension. This checking evaluates the validity of the habit-based strategies that project linguistic structures and enables the induction of linguistic rules.