There are other aspects of (14) which are controversial and have given rise to
large numbers of experimental psycholinguistic studies. For instance, there is
no place in (14)for non-linguistic general knowledge about the world; according to (14), interpretations are computed entirely on the basis of linguistic properties
of expressions without taking any account of their plausibility, and an alternative would allow encyclopaedic general knowledge to ‘penetrate’sentence perception and guide it to more likely interpretations. A further assumption in (14) is that
the different sub-components are serially ordered (in that the first stage is pho