What are the processes that underlie language comprehension, and how universal are they? What is the impact of experience and/or exposure to a language and its particularities on these processes? I will present a series of psycholinguistic studies of sentence comprehension in an attempt to answer these questions. Data obtained from a variety of tasks and techniques (reaction time, eye-movement recording, and event-related potentials) will be presented, and discussed in relation to the current pyscholinguistic models. I will show, primarily through the study of how "late" bilinguals (those who learned their second language as young adults) process sentences in their second language that, 1) the same principles that guide native language parsing are implemented in second langauge parsing, and 2) experience with and exposure to a language will induce changes in parsing, even in a language learned late. Time allowing, data from a recent series of studies on language perception and the influence of context and experience will also be discussed.