| As we all know, one of the most striking features of connected speech is the rapid rate at which it ordinarily arrives. In spite of that, listeners can with apparent ease segment the speech stream to isolate the "words", decode the grammatical structure of the sentences, determine the semantic relations between the words, and perhaps resolve semantic ambiguities and draw logical inferences and implications that lie beyond the literal meanings of the sentences themselves at the rapid rate of normal speech. The aim of this thesis is to explore the psycholinguistic nature of sentence processing in listening comprehension. It tries to answer the question of how listeners rapidly decipher the structure of sentences, gain access to meaning of the sentence as a whole and store that meaning in memory. This thesis presents a three-stage process by referring to the theoretical and empirical work done by previous researchers while retaining the author's own creative thinking and analysis. The three stages include parsing – analyzing the structure, interpretation – determining the meaning and representation – storing the information in the memory in a certain form.A first step in the process of understanding a sentence is to assign elements of its surface structure to linguistic categories, a procedure known as parsing. In other words, parsing is to process or compute the relationships between the lexical items in a sentence. The result of parsing is an internal representation of the linguistic relationships within a sentence, usually in the form of a tree structure or phrase marker. Parsing theories – Derivational Theory of Complexity, Verb Complexity Hypothesis, Constituent and Clausing Comprehension Theory, are the assumptions which attempt to account for the psychological difficulties found during parsing process and to describe the processing units of the parsing mechanism. The Derivational Theory of Complexity assumes that the psychological complexity of a sentence was related to the transformational "distance" between the underlying and surface forms of the sentence. Verb Complexity Hypothesis assumes that the listeners gain access to information about the kinds of sentence structures in which the verb can appear and they are less certain about the kind of sentence structure he/she is hearing when the sentence contains the complex verb than when it uses the simpler verb. The Constituent and Clausing Theory supports the idea that listeners first segment sentences according to the constituents they contain. Four experiments were carried out by the author in order to test the conceptual unity of constituents and they are Intuitive Judgments of Sentence Structure, Dichotic Listening, Probe Latency Study and Sentence Recall. Parsing strategies, Initial Verb Strategy, Minimal Attachment Strategy and Late Closure Strategy, Function Cue Word Strategy, are patterns or trends in identifying the indirect relation that exists between linear sequence and hierarchical organization in the sentence. According to the Initial Verb Strategy, listeners tend to assume that the first verb they hear is going to be the verb of the main clause of the sentence. The listener tests an input sequence for the goodness of fit it offers with certain canonical schemas such as 'Actor…Action…(object)'. Minimal Attachment strategy states that we prefer attaching new items into the phrase marker being constructed using the fewest syntactic nodes consistent with the rule of the language and Late Closure strategy focuses on the way in which listeners determine the sentence structure when they have reached a major clause boundary. Function Cue Word strategy states that function words in a sentence (like a and the) usually indicate the beginning of a new constituent. Using phoneme-monitoring technique, a mini-experiment was carried out by the author to find out how the existence of function words affects listeners' comprehension process.The second stage in understanding a sentence is interpretation. Obviously, syntac...
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