We examined adult and 10-13 year old skilled and average comprehenders' representation of spoken sentences. In immediate probe tasks, skilled adults were better than average adults at accessing word order information, but they were poorer at accessing sentence meaning. After hearing a text, skilled adults were more accurate than average adults in recognizing meaning, but they were less accurate in recognizing the wording of test sentences. Speeded speech increased the differences between skill groups more for memory for wording than for memory for meaning. The results suggest that comprehenders compute representations of surface form and meaning independently and simultaneously. These representations compete for attention.

Four experiments show that people differ strongly in the extent to v^ich they depend on linguistic structure during language comprehension.Structure-dependent people are immediately affected by grammatical variables,vrtiile structure-independent people are less affected by such variables. A surprising population difference between the two types of people suggests a genetic and neurological basis for the behavioral difference. All subjects were right-handed. However, structure-dependent people report no left-handers in their family, while structure-independent people do report left-handers in their family. This suggests that the neurological organization for linguistic ability in right handers with familial left-handedness, is more diffuse than for right handers with no familial left-handedness. Other facts connect this to a current hormonal theory of the ontogenesis of hemispheric asymmetries.