Cognitive scientists develop new model explaining difficulty in language comprehension

Cognitive scientists have long sought to understand what makes some sentences more difficult to comprehend than others. Any account of language comprehension, researchers believe, would benefit from understanding difficulties in comprehension. In recent years researchers successfully developed two models explaining two significant types of difficulty in understanding and producing sentences. While these models successfully predict specific patterns of comprehension difficulties, their predictions are limited and don't fully match results from behavioral experiments. Moreover, until recently researchers couldn't integrate these two models into a coherent account. A new study led by researchers from MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) now provides such a unified account for difficulties in language comprehension.