MEMORY-BASED LANGUAGE PROCESSING: Psycholinguistic Research in the 1990s

There are two main domains of research in psycholinguistics: sentence processing, concerned with how the syntactic structures of sentences are computed, and text processing, concerned with how the meanings of larger units of text are understood. In recent sentence processing research, a new and controversial theme is that syntactic computations may rely heavily on statistical information about the relative frequencies with which different syntactic structures occur in the language. In text processing, recent research has focused on what information the words and ideas of a text evoke from long- term memory quickly, passively, and at low processing cost. Research in both domains has begun to use the information that can be obtained from large corpora of naturally occurring texts.