Language comprehension

Question 1

Parsing

Answer 1

an analysis of the syntactical (grammatical) structure of each sentence

Question 2

Pragmatics

Answer 2

The study of intended meaning.

Question 3

The garden-path model

Answer 3

Frazier & Rayner (1982) (misled or ‘led up the garden path’ by ambiguous sentences):
- only one syntactical structure is initially considered for any sentence
- The simplest syntactical structure is chosen, making use of two general principles: minimal attachment and late closure.
• According to the principle of minimal attachment, the grammatical structure producing the fewest nodes (constituent parts of a sentence such as noun phrase and verb phrase) is preferred.
• The principle of late closure is that new words encountered in a sentence are attached to the current phrase or clause if this is grammatically permissible.

Question 4

Criticisms of the garden-path model

Answer 4

• The assumption that meaning plays no part in the initial assignment of grammatical structure to the sentence is probably wrong.
• It is unlikely that the initial choice of grammatical structure depends only on the principles of minimal attachment and late closure. For example, decisions about grammatical structure are influenced by punctuation when reading and by prosody (e.g., rhythm; stress) when listening to speech.

Question 5

Constrain-based theory

Answer 5

MacDonald et al. (1994) - This theory is based on a connectionist architecture, and a key assumption is that
all relevant sources of information or constraints are available immediately to the parser. Competing analyses of the current sentence are activated at the same time, with the analyses being ranked according to the strength of their activation.

Question 6

The three different forces of a sentence (as per Austin, 1976)

Answer 6

1. The locutionary force: this is simply the sentence’s literal meaning.
2. The illocutionary force: this is the speaker’s goal in speaking, often called the intended meaning.
3. The perlocutionary force: this is the actual effect of the sentence on the listener.

Question 7

Speed of processing of intended vs. literal meaning

Answer 7

More or less the same (Taylor & Taylor, 1990)

Question 8

Hardyck & Petrinovich (1970) - subvocal articulation study

Answer 8

using feedback from electromyographic (EMG) recordings of some of the muscles used in subvocal articulation, participants lowered it, which also lowered comprehension in hard but not in easy texts

Question 9

Capacity theory

Answer 9

The central assumptions made by Just and Carpenter (1992) are that there are individual differences in the capacity of working memory, and that these individual differences have substantial effects on language comprehension. Working memory capacity is assessed by the reading-span task.

Question 10

Reading span correlations with comprehension and verbal intelligence

Answer 10

It typically correlates about +0.8 with the ability to answer comprehension questions about a passage, and it correlates about +0.6 with verbal intelligence (see Just & Carpenter, 1992)

Question 11

Bridging vs Elaborative inferences

Answer 11

Bridging inferences need to be made to establish coherence between the current part of the text and the preceding text, whereas elaborative inferences serve to embellish or add details to the text

Question 12

anaphora

Answer 12

Perhaps the simplest form of bridging inference is involved in anaphora, in which a pronoun or noun has to be identified with a previously mentioned noun or noun phrase (e.g., “Fred sold John his lawn mower, and then he sold him his garden hose”_

Question 13

The constructionist approach

Answer 13

The constructionist approach originally proposed by Bransford (e.g.,
Bransford, Barclay, & Franks, 1972) and later developed by others (e.g., Johnson-Laird, 1980; van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983) represents one very influential theoretical position. Bransford argued that comprehension typically requires our active involvement to supply information that is not explicitly contained in the text. Johnson-Laird (1980) argued that readers typically construct a relatively complete “mental model” of the situation and events referred to in the text. A key implication of the constructionist approach is that numerous elaborative inferences are typically drawn while reading a text.

Question 14

The minimalist hypothesis

Answer 14

McKoon & Ratcliff (1992):
• Inferences are either automatic or strategic (goal-directed).
• Some automatic inferences establish local coherence (two or three sentences making sense on their own or in combination with easily available general knowledge); these inferences involve parts of the text that are in working memory at the same time (this is working memory in the sense of a general-purpose capacity rather than the Baddeley multiple-component working memory system discussed in Chapter 6).
• Other automatic inferences rely on information that is readily available either because it forms part of general knowledge or because it is explicitly stated in the text.
• Strategic inferences are formed in pursuit of the reader’s goals; they sometimes serve to produce local coherence.

Question 15

Search-after-meaning theory

Answer 15

Graesser, Singer, and Trabasso (1994): readers engage in a search after meaning based on the following:
• The reader goal assumption: the reader constructs a meaning for the text that addresses his or her goals.
• The coherence assumption: the reader tries to construct a meaning for the text that is coherent locally and globally.
• The explanation assumption: the reader tries to explain the actions, events, and states referred to in the text.

Question 16

Script-pointer-plus tag hypothesis

Answer 16

Schank and Abelson (1977):
• Information from the story is combined with information from the underlying script or schema in memory.
• Actions in a story are either typical (consistent with the underlying script or schema) or atypical (inconsistent with the underlying script).
• Information about atypical actions is tagged individually to the underlying script.
• Recognition memory will be better for atypical than for typical actions, because typical actions present in the story are hard to discriminate from typical actions absent from the story.
• Initial recall for atypical actions should be better than for typical actions, because they are tagged individually in memory.
• Recall for atypical actions at long retention intervals should be worse than for typical actions, because recall increasingly relies on the underlying script or schema.

Question 17

Kintsch and van Dijk’s (1978) model of discourse processing

Answer 17

There are two basic units of analysis within their model: the argument (the representation of the meaning of a word) and the proposition (the smallest unit of meaning to which we can assign a truth value; this is generally a phrase or clause). The text of a story is processed to form structures at two main levels:
• The micro-structure: the level at which the propositions extracted from the text are formed into a connected structure.
• The macro-structure: the level at which an edited version of the micro-structure (resembling the gist of the story) is formed.

Question 18

Kintsch’s construction-integration model

Answer 18

(1988, 1992, 1994)
One of the most distinctive features of this model is the assumption that the processes involved in the construction of the elaborated propositional net are relatively inefficient, with many irrelevant propositions being included.
One of the greatest advantages of the construction-integration model over the Kintsch and van Dijk (1978) theory is the assumption that there is a situational representation or mental model as well as a propositional representation.

Question 19

Event-indexing model

Answer 19

Zwaan, Langston, and Graesser (1995):
According to this model, which was further developed by Zwaan and Radvansky (1998), readers monitor five aspects or indexes of the evolving situation model at the same time when they read stories: the protagonist, temporality, causality, spatiality, intentionality.