Levels of comprehension in processing of normal and ambiguous sentences

Abstract

Three language information-processing tasks intended to introduce different levels of comprehension were studied. The Ss (a) judged whether a setence was meaningful, (b) judged whether a sentence followed from context, and (c) made up a sentence to follow a stimulus sentence. Tasks (a) and (c) were performed both with and without context. Sentences were either unambiguous, lexically ambiguous, surface structurally ambiguous, or underlying structurally ambiguous. Time to perform the tasks was measured. A meaningfulness judgment apparently does not require ambiguity resolution and hence initiates "shallow" comprehension. Patterns of interaction with ambiguity suggest that the depth of comprehension required by the other tasks may be the same. Comprehension is apparently not a unitary process, but occurs at different depths or levels depending upon task demands.