We focus here entirely on language comprehension. We also largely ignore the early, pre-syntactic stages of processing. Some properties of the human language comprehension system Perhaps the most stunning aspect of language processing is its speed . We normally comprehend language at the rate at which it is presented to us. We process while we hear or read and do not have to wait until the end of a sentence before attempting an interpretation.
Language processing is also largely automatic .
We do not normally need to pay any attention to the language computations that we perform. In fact, these computations are not accessible to consciousness. We are only confronted with their existence when normal processing is disrupted, for instance when an error has occurred. This may happen in situations where the input locally allows more than one syntactic analysis of which some are not compatible with the overall structure. Incremental operation of the language comprehension system Perhaps in order to facilitate its highly incremental mode of operation, the language computations also have a predictive character.