 Hello and welcome! Today I would like to explain a central aspect of comprehension and I will be supported by my student assistant Lena Korat. Hi! Nice to be part of this. Well, as you know, comprehension can be confined to the following central aspects. Sentence analysis, sentence understanding, that is, the assignment of meaning and the drawing of inferences. Central is a step where we work out the linguistic categories of the input string, a process known as parsing. Lena, have you come across this term? Yes, I have. Generally speaking, parsing is the process of recognizing an input string and assigning syntactic categories to its constituents, showing their semantic relationship. The visible structure which results from this process is referred to as parse tree. Isn't it? Let us look at an example. By the way, the result of a parse can also be some sort of bracketing structure like this one. Parsing looks simple. But what about more problematic sentences? What do you mean? Well, there are sentences with words that belong to different categories or as you can see here, phrases can be attached in various ways. In other words, ambiguities are the problem, aren't they? Yes, often these ambiguities are solved as soon as the following word is heard. But sometimes a string of words might allow different interpretations of the same sentence. And a special group of sentences may lead the listener to an incorrect parse. They are called garden path sentences. What do you mean garden path in the sense of leading someone up or down the garden path that is misleading him or her? Exactly. Garden path sentences are often syntactically biased towards one interpretation, which in most cases is the wrong one. Here is an example. Hi, Lisa. Hi, Sabrina. Thanks for the coffee. No problem. Have you heard the latest news? No, what's going on? Our president's policy is destroying the country. Is that his intention? I hope not. Oh yes, this is a typical example of structural ambiguity, whose two interpretations can be seen here. But how do we cope with structurally ambiguous sentences in general? Do you mean how we process them? Yes. Well, there are two models trying to solve that issue. But we will discuss these models in an additional video. Until then, bye-bye.