The four papers in this collection discuss language perception and comprehension and report on experiments in those areas. The first paper, "The Influence of Non-Linguistic Knowledge on Perceiving and Verifying Sentences," discusses the reliance of language perception and comprehension on the interaction of linguistic and world knowledge. "The Influence of Context-Dependent Comprehensibility on Sentence Perception" discusses two experiments suggesting that shadowing linguistically well-formed sentences was more accurate when the sentences were prefaced by context cues that improved their comprehensibility and that the context effect was due to the improved comprehensibility of sentences as a whole in context. In "Elastic Semantic Distance," the notion of fixed semantic distances among items in semantic memory is questioned in light of two sentence verification studies suggesting that verification of true statements was reliably faster when target sentences were preceded by relevant rather than irrelevant context sentences. The final paper, "Direct Comprehension of Individually Presented Words," reports on a study that yielded results related to the implication of visual imagery mechanisms in auditory word identification and the notion of "direct comprehension." (GW)