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Sentence Processing

Assist. prof. Dr. Sa’ad Oda Alwan

University of Kufa - College of Arts

I. The Aim of the Study

Because the sentence is the basic unit of language,
and to understand it is a prerequisite for understanding
the supersentential levels of language, this study aims at
investigating the structural properties of a sentence as
well as the speaker-listener relationship which helps to
establish a mutual understanding of each other’s
intention. Besides, the present study also aims at finding
out the reasons behind ambiguity in sentences and how
to disambiguate such sentences. The study involves
investigating the perceptual mechanisms utilized by the
listener and helps him/ her to understand the meaning of
the sentence he hears or listens to .If the listener
understands what the speaker means or intends to
convey, the conversation can continue and the speaker
can realize his aim by encouraging the listener to
establish a social relationship which is one of the basic
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functions of any human language. But if the listener fails

to understand the speaker, no communication can
continue between them. Not only this, but
misunderstanding or misinterpreting the speaker lead to
adverse results that may spoil social ties instead of
enhancing them.
II. Introduction
The power of language as a tool for communication
comes when words are joined into sentences and
collections of sentences. Understanding speech at the
sentence level is called sentence processing which
means how listeners rapidly decipher the structure of
sentences and gain access to the meaning of a sentence
as a whole (Gleason.1993:200)
One of the striking features of connected speech is
the very rapid rate at which it arrives the listener. In
fluent speech, individual words run in together and are
often not as clearly articulated as they might seem to be.
The listener imposes the isolation of individual words by
himself. The surprising lack of clarity of articulation of
many words in connected speech has been demonstrated
long ago by Pallact and Picket (1964), who found that in
many cases not only were words unrecognizable, but
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they hardly sounded like words at all. The listener has to

isolate words of connected speeches, decode the
grammatical structures of sentences and arrive at the
semantic relations between the words. He may also
resolve semantic ambiguities and draw logical inferences
and implications that lie beyond the literal meanings or
the sentences themselves Cutler and Normis (1979:113)
state that psycho-linguists have no way of observing the
sentence comprehension process. Therefore, they have
assessed the complexity of sentence processing by
means of global measures of comprehension difficulty.
On the other hand, they have invented tasks that might
be expected to reflect the operations of processing
mechanisms during comprehension.
III. Structural properties of sentences
The Structure of language can be defined in terms of
sets of rules, that show how words string together to
make a sentence and convey meaning. In order for the
listener to understand a speaker, he should share him a
common knowledge and the same set of rules. Real
world knowledge can supply constraints that operate as
part of the structure of our language. The properties of
language give rise to regularities in the language that
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makes possible a degree of predication whenever we

listen to natural speech.
Some words are more predictable than others. When
words are heard within a context this predication is even
further increased. Suppose that someone was speaking to
us, and suddenly he stopped. If we asked what the next
word might be, in fact, there is a good chance that we
would be able to know whether the next word is a noun,
a verb, an adjective and so forth. For instance when a
speaker says: the train pulled into the ………; we might
complete such sentence with the word “station” or
tunnel. So, from our knowledge of language we have a
very high expectation for either a noun or an adjective.
In addition to this, our experience contributes in helping
us to complete the sentence in addition to the general
meaning of the sentence (Gleason, 1993:201-202).
IV. Where do people pause when speaking?
Listeners knows a lot about the structure of their
language. The speech we hear has an intonation pattern
and rhythm that can give the listener hints about what is
to be heard. One of these hints comes from periodic
appearance of pauses in spontaneous speech whether
they are filled with “uhms” and “ahs” or by silence.
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Pauses occur when the speaker thinks of what to say or

how to say it. Speakers may pause at least 20 present of
the time of their speech.
Systematic studies show that pauses tend to occur
just before words of low probability in the context.
Some theorists claim that syntactic structure and
semantic analysis are conducted independently, while
others claim that they occur at the same time. (Clark and
Clark 1977:223) believe that speakers of a language plan
where to start, what to include and what to omit.
Speakers talk in order to have some effect on their
listeners. They may assert things or ask questions to get
some information. So listeners may make use of these
facts and then have better chances to comprehend
utterances.
V. Conceiving the Message
A speaker brings to the communication situation a
wide variety of general beliefs about the world and also
about the hearer’s beliefs.
The study of the comprehension process dose not
suffer from the problems of identifying and manipulating
input. The problem in this case understands. It is in fact
not so clear what is meant by expressions like: a hearer
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understood what the speaker said, or what a speaker

meant to communicate. It is generally assumed that the
speech recognition capacity identifies as much about
speech sounds as it can from the sound wave. The
syntactic parsing capacity identifies the words by their
sounds and analyzes the structure of a sentence and the
semantic interpretation capacity puts the meaning of
words together in accordance with the syntactic
relations. If the hearer is right in his interpretation, the
communication process will continue; otherwise, there
will be a breakdown. Many of these processes may
overlap both in time and brain activity. The question of
the neurological realization of these linguistic capacities
is within the field of neuorolinguistics. (Akmajian,
1996:398-401).
VI. Component Processes
It has been suggested that language comprehension is
supported by four principal types of processing. These
are: phonetic, lexical, syntactic and semantic. Phonetic
processing involves the segmentation of the acoustic
wave form into phonemes. The lexical processing
identifies a string of phonemes as a word. The syntactic
processing uses parts of speech and other syntactic
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information to recover the grammatical relations

expressed in the sentence. The semantic processing is
responsible for constructing the meaning of the whole
sentence.
An alternative model restricts the relations between
these components so that they are serial rather than
parallel. The serial model may be difficult to find
proponents. There are indications that some aspects of
sentence processing do not fill this pattern.
There are other possible language comprehension
models which order some of the processes serially and
arrange others in parallel ways. Using the sentence
identification paradigm, i.e. asking “do the items in this
string constitute a sentence?” is yet another model of
comprehending.
There is evidence of the independence of syntactic
processing from semantic processing. It has been found
that the time required to analyze a given syntactic
structure is approximately constant in spite of wide
variations in the plausibility of a particular sentence
which has that structure.
However using the lexical identification
paradigm “are all the items in this string words?” it was
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found that the subjects were able to identify each item as

a word depending on the plausibility of the sentence in
which it is found (Cooper, 1979:88-89).
VII. Deep structure Vs Surface structure and competence Vs
Performance.
The distinction between deep structure and surface
structure makes an important point for the understanding
of sentence processing. It shows that sentence processing
is conducted on two levels in which the listener analyzes
the surface structure and uses his information for the
detecting of the deep structure. It is the deep structure
that conveys the meaning of a sentence which is the
main goal of communication (Gleason, 1993:206). As
for competence and performances, Foss and Hakes
(1978:16-18) argue that the rules we know about the
language decide the possible sentences in our language.
These rules compose the linguistic competence of the
speaker of a language .One of the major tasks of
linguistics is to state the nature of these rules, and to
develop a theory of linguistic competence, of the
speakers of a language. It is that hidden knowledge
which enables the speaker of a specific language make
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judgments about grammatical and ungrammatical

utterances.
A theory of additional knowledge is about linguistic
performance. This theory describes the psychological
processes involved in using our linguistic competence in
all ways that lead to producing or understanding
different utterances
Linguistic performance does not always reflect the
speakers’ intention and so hearers sometimes
misunderstand what they hear. Valian in Cooper
(1979:3) states that if competence refers to knowledge,
and a linguistic theory is one claim about the nature of
that knowledge, performance refers to how this
knowledge is used. A complete theory of sentence
processing should take into consideration both
competence and performance.
We may expect the two theories (of competence
and performance), to be closely related to each other,
though not in a simple or straightforward way. Liles
(1971:7) states that “all speakers occasionally stammer,
make false starts, use wrong words, get words out of
order and change constructions in midcourse ". In
addition to that, the speaker may fall under the effect of
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different factors and his speech may be affected by

physical surroundings, emotions, memory span or other
distractions such as chewing a gum or smoking a
cigarette. So the listener should take such extraneous
factors into consideration when he or she listens to
someone speaking.
Bever (1970) in Cooper (1979:10) suggests that the
distinction between competence and performance is
“artificial”. But in fact this is not always the case. The
difference between the two concepts is quite distinct.
Competence represents an abstract level, whereas
performance represents the concrete level of language
i.e. the actual use of language in different daily
communications.
VIII: Perception of Constituent Structure
It is a basic linguistic assumption that sentences are
not mere strings of words, but they are structured strings
of words consisting of hierarchical units. This fact of
constituents has been brought to the psychological
laboratory by Foder, Bever and Garret. They devised a
technique to reveal the presence of phrase boundaries
when one perceives a sentence. It is assumed that a
perceptual unit tends to resist interruption.
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In one experiment, subjects were asked to listen to a

sentence during which a click occurred. Then the
subjects were asked to tell where the click occurred. The
subjects tend to assure that they had heard the click
between phrases. One of the sentences given was “That
he was happy was evident from the way he smiled".
There was a major break between “happy" and “was”. A
click was then made at different positions in the
sentence, but each subject insisted that he had heard the
sentence with only one click. Fodor and Bever's finding
was that the subjects were accurate in reporting the place
of the click between "happy" and "was”. Clicks which
happened before this break tended to be displaced
towards the rights, and those after the break towards the
left. It was concluded that the major syntactic break
plays an important role in determining the location of
noises perceived during our speech. This finding shows
that the listener perceives a sentence on the basis of his
analysis of its constituent structure, and not because of a
special acoustic cue to segmentation (Slobin, 1971)
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IX. Meaning Is The Goal of Sentence Processing.

The goal of sentence processing is to arrive at the
meaning of the sentence. To achieve this, the listener
should analyze the acoustic information arriving at his
ear in order to access the lexicon. Studies of sentence
processing suggest that under ordinary circumstances,
we strive to comprehend the meaning of a sentence as
quickly as possible, and then we discard the surface
structure to retain the meaning only. The semantic
relations derived from sentences are important to people
processing sentences and not the surface forms
themselves. The semantic relations are durable in
memory, while the surface from is not. Many
experiments have shown the importance of the meaning
of a sentence over its surface form. The goal of a
sentence processing is to extract meaning as quickly as
possible and the primary focus of the memory system is
the conceptual representation of an utterance (Gleason,
1993:211-213)
X. The comprehension of sentences
The comprehension of sentences involves much more
than the decoding of sounds, letters and lexical meaning.
It also involves the untangling of the semantics of
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sentences. Psycholinguists first began to examine the

comprehension of sentences by basing their research on
the model of sentence grammar, originally proposed by
Chomsky in the 1950s. This model claims that all
sentences are generated from a phrase structure skeleton
which is then fleshed out into everyday utterances by a
number of transformational rules. These rules are
capable of creating a variety of surface structures by re-
arranging, deleting, adding and substituting words which
are found in the deep structure. Using this model,
psycholinguists became interested in comparing the
number of transformations used to derive sentences , and
the relative difficulty native speakers experience in
comprehending them (Scovel,1998:20) Akmajian
(1996:406-8 ) adds that the hearer ,having heard an
utterance spoken by a speaker ,must recover its
meaning(s). A serious problem with this view is that: in
actual speech, sentences are physically continuous
streams of sounds, not broken down into discrete units
that we call words. The idea that we hear such sequences
of individual words as discrete linearly ordered units is
only an illusion resulting from the fact that in knowing a
language, we perceptually analyze a physical continuum
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into individual sounds as well as words and phrases.

Although a lot of interesting work on speech perception
has been done in the last 25 years, the problem of how
speech signals are converted into meaning units remains
unsolved.
XI. Ambiguity and Disambiguation
Ambiguity occurs in syntactic and semantic domains
as well as in lexical domain. The term local ambiguity is
used to describe cases where the syntactic function of a
word becomes clarified as we hear the rest of a
sentence. If the listener remains uncertain for long,
sentences will be hard to understand. For example, the
sentence the rat the cat the dog chased bit ate the cheese,
is difficult to understand because the listener has to hold
too many incomplete substructures before the sentence is
finally completed and the full structure is heard and
understood. A parser could adopt a”wait and see”
attitude in which one waits until more information is
available. This way will tax the memory. On the other
hand, a pausing strategy that keeps memory load to a
minimum would run the risk of making many passing
errors at points of local syntactic ambiguity.
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The term “standing ambiguity” refers to sentences

that remain syntactically ambiguous even when all the
lexical information has been received or heard. For
example:” the old books and magazines were on the
bench” remains ambiguous even when the sentence is
finished. This is because it is not clear whether there
should be a major syntactic boundary after “books” or
after “magazine”. The intended boundary can be marked
by using such prosodic features as stress, intonation, and
pauses. These features can also be used to resolve local
or temporary ambiguity. So we notice that prosodic cues
can operate effectively at the early stages of parsing and
interpretation of sentences which finally leads to the
comprehension of sentences (Gleason, 1993:226-227).
Cooper (1979:135) speaks about intonation and
ambiguity saying that investigation only recently has
begun on the question of whether intonation may be used
as a cue for the selection of one of the meanings of an
ambiguous utterance. It is not hard to find theories about
the possible effects of intonation on ambiguities. The
layman will almost always assume that intonation can
indicate which meaning of an ambiguous sentence is
intended by the speaker but psycholinguists seem less
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ready to attribute such syntactic function to intonation,

though they do not deny the role of intonation in
modifying the meaning of a certain sentence.
Akmajian (1996:411) wonders whether the
memory limitations or time limitation, or the arrival of
some structural units (such as the end of a clause) that
causes a certain meaning of a word to be selected by the
listener. In some cases the speaker can help the hearer to
decide on a certain meaning. In one study, subjects were
asked to listen to the fallowing ambiguous sentences
while the speaker had a particular meaning in mind:”The
steward greeted the girl with a smile “. Ambiguity is
caused by the phrase, “with a smile” which can modify
girl” or “the action of greeting “which was accompanied
by a smile. After the study, it was found that when
hearers disambiguated the sentence correctly and got the
intended meaning: smiling girl, the speaker paused (for
as much as 1/6 second between the crucial words
(greeted, the girls)), thus giving the hearers a cue to what
was meant by the speaker in the first place. This supports
the suggestion that speakers can help the hearers to
understand the exact meaning that they wish to convey.
This again shows how the process of communication
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needs a kind of cooperation on the part of the speaker.

Interaction can never take place or be effective if there is
no desire to continue it by one of the two side of the
equation: the speaker and the listener. This is, in fact,
emphasized by most sociolinguistic studies which focus
on the importance of social context or context of
situation (See Hudson, 1980).
XII. Conclusion
Throughout this study, it was found that “sentence
processing” is a complex and sometimes vague
expression that it does not yield itself to a precise
definition. This is due to lack of evidence to support
studies in this respect. The present study was just an
attempt to open a window on the subject and the
researcher hopes that he has done something of
significance in this field. There are conflicting views
about the subject. Some theorists believe that sentence
processing is an active process in which the perceptual
system attempts to determine the structure and meaning
of the sentence as it is heard. Others see that early levels
of sentence processing may be conducted independently
of knowledge potentially available from prior linguistic
context.
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The perception of running speech shows that these

auditory phonetic and phonological processes are not
enough. Ordinary speech is full with missing and
unintelligible words that it cannot be perceived
accurately in this simple way. Instead, there may be an
active process that makes speech perception consistent
with rhythm and intonation as well as with the way
speech is to be interpreted and utilized
Such a view is needed to account for the clarity of
ordinary speech perception in spite of all the obstacles
that impede the speaker from saying things in an
absolutely distinct manner.
Finally, we can say that a sentence can not be
understood as a separate unit. It should be related to its
context. This context may make things clearer. This is in
line with the view that the listener often holds and waits
for more information to help him to comprehend what he
heard previously. Moreover we can say that the listener
already has his own conceptions about the reality of
things in the world around him. So he weighs his
interpretation and comprehension of sentences against
what is there around him in the real world.
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Reference
 Akmajian Adrian (1996) linguistics: An introduction to
language and communication, (4th ed). Prentice-Hull
Private limited.
 Clark H. and Clark E (1977) Psychology and Language
New York, Harcourt.
 Cooper William E. (1979). Sentence Processing. New
Jersey.
 Foss, D, and Hakes, D. (1978). Psycholinguistics: An
introduction to the Psychology of language. Prentice-
Hall.
 Garman M. (1990) .Psycholinguistics. New York,
Harcourt. Brace College publishers.
 Gleason, J.B (1993) Psycholinguistics New York,
Harcourt, Brace College publisher.
 Hudson R.A (1980) .Sociolinguistics Cambridge: C.U.P
 Scovel Thomas (1998) Psycholinguistics .Oxford: O .U.P
 Slobin. D.I (1971) Psycholinguistics. New York : Scott
foreman and company
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‫الخالصة‬
‫بًا اٌ انجًهت ًْ انٕحذة االساسٍت فً انهغت فاٌ ْذا انبحذ ٌٓذف انى دراست‬
‫انخصائص االساسٍت فً بُاء انجًهت ٔانؼاللت بٍٍ انًخحذد ٔانسايغ ٔانخً حؤدي انى‬
‫اٌجاد فٓى يشخزن نًا ٌمصذِ كم يٍ انطزفٍٍ‪.‬‬
‫كًا اٌ انبحذ ٌخُأل انؼٕايم انخً حؤدي انى غًٕض انجًهت ٔكٍفٍت اسانت ْذا‬
‫انغًٕض ػالٔة ػهى االنٍاث انخً ٌؼخًذ ػهٍٓا انسايغ فً فٓى انًؼُى انذي ٌمصذِ‬
‫انًخكهى‪.‬‬
‫إٌ ْذا انفٓى ٌؤدي انى لٍاو ػاللت حفاْى بٍٍ انسايغ ٔانًخحذد ٔبذٌٔ ْذا انفٓى‬
‫ال ًٌكٍ ححمٍك يثم ْذِ انؼاللت انخً ًْ ٔظٍفت يًٓت يٍ ٔظائف انهغت‪.‬‬
‫ٔلذ خهص انبحذ انى اٌ ػًهٍت فٓى انجًهت ًْ حؼبٍز يؼمذ ٔغايط احٍاَا ً ٔاٌ‬
‫انبحذ انحانً ْٕ يحأنت انى فخح َافذة ػهى انًٕظٕع‪ .‬اٌ فٓى انكالو انًسخًز ٌظٓز‬
‫اٌ انؼًهٍاث انسًؼٍت ٔانخصائص انصٕحٍت ًْ نٍسج كافٍت نفٓى انجًهت بم ُْان‬
‫ػٕايم كثٍزة ٌُبغً اٌ حؤخذ باالػخبار يثم غزٌمت انخكهى ٔانُبزة فً انكالو ٔانًٕلف‬
‫انذي لٍهج فٍّ انجًهت‪.‬‬
‫انجًهت ٌُبغً اٌ ال حؤخذ كٕحذة يسخمهت ٔاًَا كجشء يٍ يٕلف أ سٍاق يحذد‪,‬‬
‫ْٔذا انًٕلف ٌجؼم االيٕر اكثز ٔظٕحا ً ‪ .‬اٌ انسايغ اٌعا ً نّ دٔر يٓى فً حؼأَّ يغ‬
‫انًخكهى حخى ٌفٓى يا ٌمال نّ‪.‬‬