Monitoring Sentence Comprehension

Psycholinguists have no way of directly observing the sentence-comprehension process. Therefore, they have on the one hand assessed the complexity of sentence processing by means of global measures of comprehension difficulty (paraphrasing, for instance, click location, sentence classification, or other tasks). On the other hand, they have devoted considerable ingenuity to inventing tasks that might be expected to reflect the operations of processing mechanisms during comprehension. The dependent variable in these latter tasks is reaction time (RT); as Pachella (1974) noted: “by default: there simply isn’t much else that can be measured [p. 43].” If variations in response latency correlate with experimental manipulations of the sentences being understood, they are assumed to reflect variations in the complexity of processing.