Chapter 13

Text Structure and Memory. Memory for textual material is sensitive to hierarchical and causal structure of that text and tends to be better when people attend to that structure.

1. Ability to identify the top-level structure of a text an important predictor of memory for the text 2. Text tends to be held together by causal and logical structures. Reading times increased when preceded by high probable causes. It takes longer to understand a distant causal relation. Participants displayed better memory for a causally related pair.

Text Processing. Possible Types of Relations among Sentences in a Text

1. Response 2. Specific 3. Explanation 4. Evidence 5. Sequence 6. Cause 7. Goal 8. Collection

Levels of Representation of a Text

1. Surface level of representation of exact sentences (forgotten rapidly). 2. Propositional level (better retained) 3. Situation model- consists of major points, not said but strongly implied (highly retained)

3 stages of language comprehension

1. perceptual processes 2. parsing 3. utilization

Pronominal Reference. Another aspect of processing reference concerns the interpretation of pronouns.

1. use number or gender cues. 2. a syntactic cue to pronominal reference is that pronouns tend to refer to objects in the same grammatical role (e.g., subject vs object) 3. strong recency effect: the most recent candidate is preferred. 4. people can use their knowledge of the world to determine reference.

Modularity Compared with Interactive Processing. There are two bases people disambiguate ambiguous sentences .

1. use of semantics 2. use of syntax.

Processing of Syntactic Structure. The basic task in parsing a sentence is to combine the meanings of the individual words to arrive at a meaning for the overall sentence. Two basic sources of syntactic information that can guide us in this task.

1. word order 2. inflectional structure

Integration of Syntax and Semantics. Listeners appear to combine both syntactic and semantic information in comprehending a sentence. The weighting depends on the language.

American speakers prefer to go with the syntax but will sometimes adopt the semantic interpretation. People will integrate semantic and syntactic cues to arrive at an interpretation of a sentence.

Brain regions involved in discourse processing

Coherence monitoring network Spatial imagery network Text integration network Coarse semantic processing network

When people come to a point of ambiguity in a sentence, they adopt one interpretation, which they will have to retract if it is later contradicted.

If a syntactic ambiguity is resolved quickly after we encounter it, we seem to be unaware of ever considering two interpretations. Only if resolution is postponed substantially beyond the ambiguous phrase are we aware of the need to reinterpret it.

Negatives. Negative sentences appear to suppose a positive sentence and then ask us to infer what must be true if the positive sentence is false.

Participants check the supposition first and then process the negation. Comprehenders process a negative first by processing its embedded supposition and then the negation.

Neural Indicants of the Processing of Transient Ambiguity. Brain imaging studies reveal how people process ambiguous sentences. Mason, Just et. al compared unambiguous, ambiguous preferred, and ambiguous unpreferred sentences.

Participants prefer the unambiguous sentence which results in the least activation owing to the greater ease in processing that sentence. Activation is greater for the sentence that ends un the unpreferred way.

In understanding a sentence, listeners make bridging inferences to connect it to prior sentences but only sometimes make elaborative inferences that connect to possible future material.

Participants with high reading ability make the elaborative inference; low ability readers had not.

semantic considerations

People make use of the meanings of the words themselves. Young children rely more heavily on semantic patterns than in syntactic patterns. When adults paraphrased sentences, more than 60% of participants paraphrased in a way that gave them a more conventional meaning. When a semantic principle is placed in conflict with syntactic principle, the semantic principle will sometimes (but not always) determine the interpretation of a sentence.

Jarvella read to participants messages with interruptions at various points.

The data show that participants have best memory for the last major constituent, a result consistent with the hypothesis that they retain a verbatim representation of the last constituent only.

Comprehenders consider multiple possible candidates for the referent of a pronoun and use syntactic and semantic cues to select a referent.

The results of both the Corbett and Chang and Ehrlich and Rayner study indicate that resolution of pronoun reference lasts beyond the reading of the pronoun itself. This finding indicates that processing is not always as immediate as immediacy of processing principle might imply. The processing of pronominal reference spills over into later fixations and there is still priming for the unselected reference at the end of the sentence.

Neural Indicants of Syntactic and Semantic Processing. N400 is an indicant of difficulty in semantic processing. P600 occurs in syntactic violations. ERP recording indicate syntactic and semantic violations elicit different responses in the brain.

The two types of sentences containing a semantic anomaly evoked a negative shift (N400) at the midline site about 400 ms after the critical word. In contrast, two types of sentences containing a syntactic anomaly were associated with a positive shift (P600) in the parietal area about 600 ms after the onset of the critical word. Ainsworth et al used the fact that each process --syntactic and semantic--affects a different brain region to argue that syntactic and semantic processes are separable.

Aaron and Scarborough: when people read passages, they naturally pause at boundaries between clauses.

They noticed U-shaped patterns with prolonged pauses at the phrase boundaries. With the completion of each major phrase, participants seemed to need time to process it.

Loftus and Zanni: choice of articles could affect listeners' beliefs. Comprehenders take the definite article "the" to imply the existence of a reference for the noun.

This finding has important implications for the interrogation of eyewitnesses.

True or False: In processing a sentence, we try to extract as much information as possible from each word and spend some additional wrap-up time at the end of each phrase.

True

True or False: Participants process the meaning of a sentence one phrase at a time and maintain access to a phrase only while processing its meaning.

True

True or False: Sometimes people rely on the plausible semantic interpretation of words in a sentence.

True

True or False: The identification of a constituent structure is important to the parsing of a sentence.

True

True or False: When people follow a story, they construct high-level situation model of the story that is more durable than than the memory for the surface sentences or the propositions that made up the story.

True

constituents

We have learned to interpret subpatterns, or phrases of sentences to combine the interpretations of these subpatterns. These subpatterns correspond to basic phrases or units in a sentence's structure.

Two meanings of an ambiguous word are momentarily active, but context operates very rapidly to select the appropriate meaning.

When an ambiguous word is presented, participants select a particular meaning within 700 ms.

Lexical ambiguity

a single word has two meanings. There is often no structural difference in the two interpretations of a sentence.

elaborative inferences (also called forward inferences)

add new interpretation to the interpretation of the text and often predict what will be coming up in the text. The problem with elaborative inferences is that there are no bounds on how many such inferences can be made, optional-- it takes effort to make these inferences

transient ambiguity

ambiguity in a sentence that is resolved by the end of the sentence. an ambiguity in the middle of a sentence for which the resolution depends on how the sentence ends. implies we cannot know the correct interpretation immediately.

utilization

comprehenders use the mental representation of the sentence's meaning

The propositions in a text can be organized _____ according to various semantic relations.

hierarchically

permanent ambiguity

many sentences can be interpreted in two or more ways. ambiguity remains at the end of the sentence.

center-embedded sentence

one clause is embedded in another clause. Greater activation in Broca's area of center-embedded sentences. Broca's area is usually found to be more active when participants have to deal with more complex sentence structures.

principal of minimal attachment

one interprets a sentence in a way that causes minimal complication of its phrase structure.

interactive processing

opposes modularity position. argue that syntax and semantics are combined at all levels of processing.

Modularity position

participants seemingly do all their initial processing by using syntactic cues.

immediacy of interpretation

people try to extract meaning out of each word as it arrives and do not wait until the end of a sentence or even the end of a phrase to decide how to interpret a word. implies that we commit to an interpretation of a word or a phrase right away. People try to determine who a pronoun refers to immediately upon encountering it.

first stage of language comprehension

perceptual processes encode the spoken (acoustic) or written message

Comprehension consists of a ________ stage, a _______ stage, and a __________ stage, in that order.

perceptual, parsing, utilization

parsing

process by which the words in the message are transformed into a mental representation of the combined meaning of the words

bridging inferences (also called backward inferences)

reach back in the text to make connections with earlier parts of the text (which is not directly stated or even suggested in the story), made automatically

Participants appear to be able to use ________ immediately to guide _________ decisions.

semantic information; syntactic

People use the _______ of word order and ______ to help interpret a sentence.

syntactic cues; inflection

Activity in Broca's area increases when participants encounter a ________ and when they have to change an initial interpretation of a sentence.

transient ambiguity

garden-path sentences

when you do a double-take on a sentence by first reading one interpretation and then a second. Commit to one interpretation at a certain point only to discover that it is wrong at another point.