Understanding the mechanisms of language comprehension

RESEARCH FEATURES

NOVEMBER 22, 2016

Dr Julie A Van Dyke, a senior research scientist in the field of psycholinguistics at Haskins Laboratories, Connecticut, USA, is helping to unravel the mechanisms underlying language comprehension, including the processes that lead to poor understanding when reading or listening.

Language comprehension is one of the most automatic tasks that humans perform. Yet it is also one of the most complex, requiring the simultaneous integration of many different types of information, such as knowledge about letters and their sounds, spelling, grammar, word meanings, and general world knowledge. In addition, general cognitive abilities such as attention monitoring, inferencing, and memory retrieval are used in order to organise this information into a single meaningful representation.

Read the article at Research Features