Reaching Sentence and Reference Meaning

This chapter focuses on how people establish reference to objects in the external world and the meaning of sentences more broadly. The review proceeds from psychological and computational models of semantic memory up to how people establish reference to particular objects in the environment via pre- and post-nominal (linguistic) modification. We also briefly touch upon the interpretation of events and enriched composition. A distinction is drawn between meaning activation pre-lexical access and meaning activation that results from the combinatorial process of integrating multiple words together into structured constituents and phrases. Many of the reviewed studies used the Visual World Paradigm, and thus, eye movements are the primary outcome measure.