Automatic Processes in Language Comprehension*
Giovanni B. Flores d’Arcais · 2018
This chapter discusses the issue of automatic v. controlled processes in language comprehension. It explores mainly on two areas of psycholinguistic research: the first topic will include a broad range of results from studies on lexical access and the second area is syntactic processing. The chapter looks at evidence from automatic syntactic processing taking place even in the absence of direct subsequent use of the information made available at the first stage. It examines the possible implications of these data for developing a theory of language processing that is capable of making some contribution to cognitive neuropsychology at large. The chapter describes a couple of the many studies available in contemporary literature on lexical access, which offers strong evidence for the automatic character of the process of accessing the meaning of a word. It presents some evidence on automatic computation of syntactic information during the process of language comprehension.