THE CAPACITY THEORY OF SENTENCE COMPREHENSION - CRITIQUE OF JUST AND CARPENTER (1992)

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.