a procedure in which participants are briefly presented with simple sentences and asked to make quick judgments about them. For example, a person might have 5 seconds to read the sentence The sky is blue and respond whether it is true or false. Numerous variations of this basic task exist, including ones in which the focus is on different sentence characteristics or types of responses, ones in which sentences are matched with pictures, and ones in which individuals simultaneously perform other tasks (e.g., imagining a particular visual pattern). The sentence-verification task most commonly is used in cognitive research on semantic memory and verbal comprehension.