Is native speaker variation in understanding complex sentences due to individual differences in working memory capacity or in syntactic competence? The answer to this question has very important consequences for both theoretical and applied concerns in linguistics and education. This book is distinctive in giving an historical and interdisciplinary perspective on the rule- based and experience-based debate and in supporting an integrated account. In the study reported here, variation was found to be due to differences in syntactic competence and the author argues that sentence comprehension is a learned skill, displaying many of the general characteristics of cognitive skills. The book will be stimulating reading for psycholinguists, theoretical linguists, applied linguists and educators.

DR NGONI CHIPERE is Research Fellow in the Department of Education at Reading University, working on child language development. His doctoral research in sentence comprehension was undertaken at Cambridge University and he held a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate prior to his current post . He has extensive teaching experience in schools.

List of Figures List of Tables Preface Acknowledgements Introduction Finite State and Generative Models Early Experimental Studies Connectionist and Symbolic Models Current Theories of Individual Differences Long-Term Working Memory Saussure's Theory of Language Patterns of Individual Differences Effects of Recall Training and Comprehension Training Conclusion Notes Appendix Bibliography Index