Abstract: This paper described an experiment on Chinese sentence compre- hension based on the paradigm of sentence verification, taking the hy- brid procedure of normal (no signal) tests and signal tests. The expe- rimental results showed: (1) The time needed for sentence comprehension depends on the subject's cognitive degree to semantic relation between concepts in the sentence; (2) Sentence comprehension is a process of partial information accumulation. From the experimental materials, the authors discussed the structure of human semantic memory and evaluated some models concerned.

Key words: semantic network, memory structure, sentence processing, memory model