Discourse Processes最新文献

We segment what we read into meaningful events, each separated by a discrete boundary. How does event segmentation during encoding relate to the structure of story information in long-term memory? To evaluate this question, participants read stories of fictional historical events and then engaged in a post-reading verb arrangement task. In this task, participants saw verbs from each of the events placed randomly on a computer screen, and then they arranged the verbs into groups onscreen based on their understanding of the story. Participants who successfully comprehended the story placed verbs from the same event closer to each other than verbs from different events, even after controlling for orthographic, text-based, semantic, and situational overlap between verbs. Thus, how people structure story information into separate events during online comprehension is associated with how that information is stored in memory. Specifically, story information within an event is bound together in memory more so than information between events.

In the current investigation, we used structural equation mediation modeling to examine the relations between executive function (indexed by measures of working memory, shifting, and inhibition), decoding ability, and reading comprehension in a sample of 298 6- to 8-year-old children (N =132 and 166 for boys and girls, respectively). Results for the full sample indicated that executive function was mediated by decoding ability. When sex was examined as a moderator of these associations, there was evidence for a trend suggesting that direct relations between executive function and reading comprehension were stronger for girls compared to boys; no significant differences were found for other direct and indirect relations. Taken together, these findings highlight the importance of executive function in supporting underlying integrative processes associated with reading comprehension and emphasize the need to further consider the role of executive function in relation to reading.

Google the question, "How is the Internet changing the way we communicate?," and you will find no shortage of opinions, or fears, about the Internet altering the way we communicate. Although the Internet is not necessarily making communication briefer (neither is the Internet making communication less formal), the Internet is manifesting our preference for writing over speaking. I propose that our preference for communicating through Internet-based text derives from a fundamental feature of writing: In contrast to speech, which is most often synchronous, text is most often asynchronous.

Plural phrases are open to many interpretations in English, where cumulative interpretations of noun and verb phrases are possible without any disambiguating morphology. A sentence like Every week, the high school kids went to the movies or the ballgame might involve quantifying over multiple occurrences of a single scenario, in which subsets of the kids do different things, or it might involve quantifying over distinct scenarios, in which all of the kids do one thing or all of them do the other. In the present work and related earlier work (Harris et al., 2013), we pursue the No Extra Times principle that favors interpretations where a phrase is construed as describing a single event taking place during a given time period. In two written interpretation studies, we found that participants more often interpret indeterminate sentences with disjunctive predicates by partitioning the set of individuals rather than partitioning the predicate to denote distinct scenarios or times. We conclude by offering some speculations about why partitioning the eventuality denoted by the verb phrase into multiple times is more costly than partitioning the entities denoted by its subject noun phrase into multiple sets.

Three self-paced reading experiments explored the processing of "only" and its interaction with context. In isolated sentences, the focus particle "only" predicts an upcoming contrast. Ambiguous replacive sentences (e.g., "The curator embarrassed the gallery owner in public, not the artist") with "only" on the subject or object showed faster reading of the contrast phrase ("not the artist") than without it. The position of "only" also influenced the phrase's meaning; despite a bias toward object contrasts, subject "only" increased subject interpretations. If preceding context provides another reason for the focus particle, it no longer predicts an upcoming contrast. In biasing contexts including indirect questions, there was no facilitation when "only" marked the argument which answered the question, while "only" on the other argument slowed processing. Both "only" and context influenced interpretation. The results show that focus particles and questions can each influence processing of an upcoming contrast on- and off-line.

The goal of this study was to examine predictions derived from the Lexical Quality Hypothesis (Perfetti & Hart, 2002; Perfetti, 2007) regarding relations among word-decoding, working-memory capacity, and the ability to integrate new concepts into a developing discourse representation. Hierarchical Linear Modeling was used to quantify the effects of two text properties (length and number of new concepts) on reading times of focal and spillover sentences, with variance in those effects estimated as a function of individual difference factors (decoding, vocabulary, print exposure, and working-memory capacity). The analysis revealed complex, cross-level interactions that complement the Lexical Quality Hypothesis.

This paper considers points in turn construction where conversation researchers have shown that talk routinely continues beyond possible turn completion, but where we find bodily-visual behavior doing such turn extension work. The bodily-visual behaviors we examine share many features with verbal turn extensions, but we argue that embodied movements have distinct properties that make them well-suited for specific kinds of social action, including stance display and by-play in sequences framed as subsidiary to a simultaneous and related verbal exchange. Our study is in line with a research agenda taking seriously the point made by Goodwin (2000a, b, 2003), Hayashi (2003, 2005), Iwasaki (2009), and others that scholars seeking to account for practices in language and social interaction do themselves a disservice if they privilege the verbal dimension; rather, as suggested in Stivers/Sidnell (2005), each semiotic system/modality, while coordinated with others, has its own organization. With the current exploration of bodily-visual turn extensions, we hope to contribute to a growing understanding of how these different modes of organization are managed concurrently and in concert by interactants in carrying out their everyday social actions.

We report 3 experiments that examined younger and older adults' reliance on "good-enough" interpretations for garden-path sentences (e.g., "While Anna dressed the baby played in the crib") as indicated by their responding "Yes" to questions probing the initial, syntactically unlicensed interpretation (e.g., "Did Anna dress the baby?"). The manipulation of several factors expected to influence the probability of generating or maintaining the unlicensed interpretation resulted in 2 major age differences: Older adults were generally more likely to endorse the incorrect interpretation for sentences containing optionally transitive verbs (e.g., hunted, paid), and they showed decreased availability of the correct interpretation of subordinate clauses containing reflexive absolute transitive verbs (e.g., dress, bathe). These age differences may in part be linked to older adults' increased reliance on heuristic-like good-enough processing to compensate for age-related deficits in working memory capacity. The results support previous studies suggesting that syntactic reanalysis may not be an all-or-nothing process and might not be completed unless questions probing unresolved aspects of the sentence structure challenge the resultant interpretation.

Accessibility is one of the most important challenges at the intersection of linguistic and psycholinguistic studies of text and discourse processing. Linguists have shown how linguistic indicators of referential coherence show a systematic pattern: Longer linguistic forms (like full lexical NPs) tend to be used when referents are relatively low accessible, shorter forms (pronouns and zero anaphora) are used when referents are highly accessible. This linguistic theory fits in nicely with a dynamic view of text and discourse processing: When a reader proceeds through a text, the activation of concepts as part of the reader's representation fluctuates constantly. Hypotheses considering activation patterns can be tested with on-line research methods like reading time or eye-movement recording. The articles in this special issue show how accessibility phenomena need to be studied from a linguistic and a psycholinguistic angle, and in the latter case from interpretation as well as production.

Three experiments investigated how readers manage their mental representations during narrative comprehension. The first experiment investigated whether readers' access to their mental representations of the main character in a narrative becomes enhanced (producing a "benefit") when the character is rementioned; the first experiment also investigated whether readers' access to the main character in a narrative becomes weakened or interfered with (producing a "cost") when a new character is introduced. The purpose of the second experiment was to ensure that there was nothing unusually salient about the accessibility of names; thus, we assessed readers' access to an object associated with the main character rather than the character's name. Again, readers demonstrated increased accessibility to the main character when it was rementioned in the narrative, and readers demonstrated reduced accessibility to the main character when a new character was introduced. A third experiment compared more-skilled and less-skilled readers' abilities to manage these mental representations during narrative comprehension. Findings were consistent with research suggesting that more-skilled readers are more skilled at attenuating interfering information (i.e., suppression). Data from all 3 experiments suggest that successful narrative comprehension involves managing mental representations of salient and often times interfering characters.