Discourse Processing

Question 1

What is discourse?

Answer 1

Linguistic unit composed of several sentences (written, spoken, comprehension and production).

Question 2

What is the construction-integration model?

Answer 2

Two stage model of discourse comprehension by Kintsch (1988)

Question 3

What are the two stages of the construction-integration model?

Answer 3

Construction stage (which consist of surface model and text base) and integration stage (situation model).
3 different types of mental representations.

Question 4

Describe the construction stage of discourse comprehension

Answer 4

Surface model is word meanings and syntactic Parsing. Text-base is the propositions and inferences.

Question 5

Describe the integration stage of discourse comprehension

Answer 5

Situation model which is ideas/events the text is about.
Network of inter-related propositions is integrated into coherent structure. Any contradiction or incorrect inferences are resolved.

Question 6

Who did the study about psychological reality of propositions?

Answer 6

Ratcliff and Mckoon (1978).

Question 7

How was psychological reality of propositions tested by Ratcliff and mcKoon (1978)?

Answer 7

Subjects read sentences, did some distractor tasks and then later asked to write down what they remembered about the sentences. In each trial, a word from either the same or different clause (proposition) was given as a clue.
They measured the retrieval rate to see if the subjects would recall the clauses related to the proposition or from s different proposition.
They found that propositions are encoded as a package. Some elements in the same proposition are organized closely in memory.

Question 8

What is the situation model also called?

Answer 8

The mental model.

Question 9

What is the situation/mental model?

Answer 9

Internal representation of the external world. It says that comprehenders construction a model as they go along to represent what they hear and read.
Models represent different types of information about situations described in discourse (space, time, causation, motivation of characters in discourse).
Models are dynamically updates as discourse is processed.

Question 10

Bransford and Johnson (1972) conducted a study investigating how does context help form situation model. How did they test it and what did they find?

Answer 10

Comprehension and memory of abstract stories.

Question 11

How many conditions did Bransford and Johnson (1972) have ?

Answer 11

No context (picture)
Context (picture) before text
Context (picture) after text

Question 12

Bransford and Johnson (1972) what did they find?

Answer 12

Comprehensibility rating and numbers of ideas recalled.
Context before > context after = no context (context before is better than context after and no context)

Context helps readers to form a mental model to understand and memorize texts.
However, content should be available at the time of comprehension.

Question 13

How is spatial information represented in the situation model?

Answer 13

Bransford, Barclay and franks (1972) looked at sentence recognition. Participants read one of 4 sentences, and later decided which of two sentences they had read.

They found that the model includes spatial relationships of object. Memory of the surface form of sentences decays rapidly.
Comprehenders don’t necessarily maintain the surface form of the sentence in memory.
Comprehenders form a situation model from a sentence, and maintain it in memory.

Question 14

What is verbatim?

Answer 14

The surface form of the sentence

Question 15

What did Fletcher and Chrysler (1990) investigate? (Sentence recognition)

Answer 15

If the surface form of the sentence (verbatim) represented in comprehenders memory.

Question 16

In a sentence recognition task what did Fletcher and Chrysler (1990) find?

Answer 16

They read a text and later had to decide whether a test sentence appeared in the text. It had prices on items (statue, car, necklace , vase and so on). 
3 sentensens (surfacd, textbased and situation model) but they were all false according to the text they read. 

They found that the surface form of the text is the most difficult to remember. The situation model is maintained in memory relatively well.
There are different types of mental representations made from text.

Question 17

What is the Moses illusion?

Answer 17

How many animals of each type did Moses take on the ark?

Question 18

Why doesn the Moses illusion happen in discourse processing?

Answer 18

Situation-specific real-world knowledge is automatically activated during comprehension, and readers focus on specific parts of the knowledge.
Thus, the situation model could override semantic information in individual words in the sentence.

Question 19

Which ways has been used to test reducing the Moses illusion?

Answer 19

It-cleft (it was Moses)
There insertion (there was a guy called Moses)
Capitalization (MOSES)

Question 20

In what ways can we attract attention to certain parts of a sentence?

Answer 20

Comprehenders take longer to process a given word if it appears as the first word in the sentence.
And they remember the first mentioned object better than subsequent ones.

Question 21

Does the content in the most recent substructure have advantage?

Answer 21

Comprehenders are bear at remembering objects mentioned in the most recent substructure (proposition). Thus, objects in previous substructure become less accessible. The effect is not simply a recency effect. Attention shift occur across substructures.

Question 22

What is inference?

Answer 22

The derivation of additional knowledge from facts already know . This might involve going beyond what is actually presented in the linguistic input.

Question 23

What is inference in discourse processing?

Answer 23

(1) the dentist drilled the tooth. The broom was tattered.
(2) the worker swept the floor. The broom was tattered.

(1) is incoherent, whereas (2) in coherent. But 2 depends on inference that works out the relationship between swept and broom.

Question 24

What is bridging inference?

Answer 24

The inference bridges new information to old information.

Question 25

How did Haviland and Clark (1974) test bridging information?

Answer 25

They looked at reading times for sentences with either repetition or inference in the second sentence.
They found that reading times for the second sentence was faster in repetition than in inference. And the extra time was presumably spent to determine if “picnic supplies” is a satisfactory referential for “beer”

Question 26

What is causal bridging?

Answer 26

Highly related sentences are read faster than moderately related sentences. The extra reading times was presumably due to the process by which readers infer the causal relationship between the sentences in the moderately related sentences.

Question 27

A study looked at causal versus temporal inference in causal bridging inference. What did they find?

Answer 27

They had 2 sentences in each condition (causal and temporal). Then they were asked a generic question and measured reaction time.
Reaction time was faster in causal sentences than in temporal.
Which means that the real world knowledge accessed during the course of drawing the causal bridging inference is temporarily activated and linked to the text representation.

Question 28

What is elaborating inference?

Answer 28

Inference that requires extending what’s in the text to real knowledge.

Question 29

What did singer (1980) find about elaborative inference?

Answer 29

There were 3 conditions. Explicit, bridging inference and elaborative inference.
The study found that judgement times for the test sentence was equal for explicit and bridging but judgement time for elaborative inference was slower than the other two.
This indicates that elaborative inference is not an automatic product of comprehension.
Elaborative and bridging inferences involve different mechanisms.

Question 30

What is “open role” in inference?

Answer 30

To maintain the coherence in discourse, comprehenders fill an open role in bridging inference.
Yuki drove to Edinburgh yesterday. The car kept overheating.
The open role is car because yuki must have driven the car.

Question 31

What did Garrod and Terra (2000) find in their study about open role in inference?

Answer 31

Inference (based on real world knowledge) isn’t made until a later stage of processing.
Initially, lexical information overrides discourse coherence.

Question 32

Explain Garrods and Terras (2000) two stage inference model

Answer 32

Stage 1 - bonding.
Stage 2 - resolution.

In stage 1 items suggested by lexical content are automatically activated and bodes with the verb (write = pen). Open roles (instrument) are filled with those items.
In stage 2 the link between the open role and the funk,er is checked against the discourse.

Question 33

How are open roles filled in inference discourse?

Answer 33

First using lexical associations between verb and open roles, them real world knowledge later.