Gs. Waters et D. Caplan, THE CAPACITY THEORY OF SENTENCE COMPREHENSION - CRITIQUE OF JUST AND CARPENTER (1992), Psychological review, 103(4), 1996, pp. 761-772
The authors review M. A. Just and P. A. Carpenter's (1992) ''capacity'
' theory of sentence comprehension and argue that the data cited by Ju
st and Carpenter in support of the theory are unconvincing and that th
e theory is insufficiently developed to explain or predict observed pa
tterns of results. The article outlines an alternative to the capacity
theory, according to which the unconscious, obligatory operations inv
olved in assigning the syntactic structure of a sentence do not use th
e same working memory resource as that required for conscious, control
led verbally mediated processes.