THE CAPACITY THEORY OF COMPREHENSION - NEW FRONTIERS OF EVIDENCE AND ARGUMENTS

A capacity theory of comprehension (M. A. Just & P. A. Carpenter, 1992 ) has provided an integrated account of several central aspects of sen tence comprehension, such as the processing of syntactic ambiguity, co mplex embeddings, syntactic (non) modularity, and individual differenc es, in terms of the working-memory capacity for language. Some of the evidence supporting the theory is questioned by G. S. Waters and D. Ca plan (1996a). This article identifies some of Waters and Caplan's erro rs about the empirical support in Just and Carpenter (1992), evaluates Waters and Caplan's alternative hypothesis, and presents the results of a new neuroimaging study that supports capacity theory and not Wate rs and Caplan's separate resources hypothesis.