This thesis presents an account of some of the mental mechanisms and processes that take the addressee from a linguistic input to the interpretation of that input. Because on-line interpretation involves our knowledge of language, the relation between input processing and grammar is evaluated. The full interpretation of a linguistic input also involves pragmatic, i.e. central cognitive processes, but these processes are the least well understood within psycholinguistics. Relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986) gives us a way of making our understanding of these processes more explicit. However, Relevance theory claims turn out to be incompatible with psycholinguistic models which postulate an autonomous syntactic parser, such as the 'Garden-path' model. A review of the experimental literature reveals that the findings claimed to support the 'Garden-path' model do not in fact support it. Likewise, the principle of Lexical Preference, proposed to account for how verb subcategorization frames are accessed, turns out not to be supported by the experimental evidence. Full interpretation involves computing a conceptual representation, and an account is given of what constitutes conceptual structure. This leads to the proposal that verbs are represented as structured concepts. This view of verb representation together with Relevance theory can account for when arguments of verbs can be left implicit. Finally, an account is given of how the addressee computes the propositional form communicated by an utterance, by building hypotheses about the conceptual structure of the proposition on-line. These hypotheses are based on structural information stored under the concepts referred to by the utterance. This proposal can account for psycholinguistic research findings, with pragmatics playing an integral role in the explanations: it is no longer grafted onto the model as a psycholinguistic afterthought.

Five tachistoscopic studies were conducted to investigate patterns of hemispheric specialization for different types of word pair comparisons among monolinguals and fluent bilingual adults. Bilinguals were further grouped as "early" or "late" depending on whether their second language was acquired in infancy or in adolescence. All groups were faster at making orthographic comparisons for left visual field input but were faster in the right visual field for phonological and syntactic judgments. Semantic comparisons yielded no visual field asymmetries for monolinguals or late bilinguals but yielded a left visual field superiority for early bilinguals. Group differences in response strategy were also noted whereby early bilinguals favoured semantic processing and late bilinguals surface processing. The results are interpreted to suggest that lateralization patterns are primarily influenced by task-related processing demands but that early versus late onset of bilingualism predisposes the use of different processing strategies for performing a particular task.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Glasgow, 2008. / Ph.D. thesis submitted to the Faculty of Information and Mathematical Sciences, Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow, 2008. Includes bibliographical references. Print version also available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego and San Diego State University, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 346-369).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Linguistics, August 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 88-95).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Psychology, December 1999. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1973. / Bibliography: leaves 71-76.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1995. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 85-89).

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.