Mechanisms underlying real-time spoken language understanding

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Humans encounter and understand spoken utterances at the rate of about 180 words per minute. This is extremely impressive when considering the numerous mental processes that must occur to understand a sentence. These include things like identifying individual speech sounds, isolating boundaries between words, recognizing words from sound sequences, identifying grammatical relationships among words, computing the combined meaning of words in a sentence, and recognizing a speaker's communicative intent in the situational context. A core goal in research on spoken language comprehension is to reveal how the mind coordinates these tasks in a way that explains the efficiency of real-time comprehension as well as listeners' apparent success at understanding language, as reflected in the comparatively low rate at which comprehension breaks down.