Memory and Sentence Comprehension

Question 1

what is discourse?

Answer 1

set of sentences that are related to one another in a meaningful way
- local
-global

Question 2

what is local coherence?

Answer 2

coherence based on relationship between adjacent pairs of sentences

Question 3

what is global coherence?

Answer 3

coherence based on relationship between all of the sentences in discourse and overall theme

Question 4

establishing local coherence means?

Answer 4

• cohesion devices
• anaphoric references (anaphor and antecendent)

Question 5

what are cohesion devices?

Answer 5

signals within a text that indicate connections among sentences
(ex: conjunctions)

Question 6

what are anaphoric references?

Answer 6

process using an expression that refers to prior info in discourse
- anaphor
- antecedent

Question 7

what is an anaphor?

Answer 7

gets meaning from earlier expression

Question 8

what is an antecedent?

Answer 8

earlier expression that anaphor refers to

Question 9

what is the given/new strategy?

Answer 9

a comprehension strategy in which we determine what information is already in memory (i.e., the “given” information) & associate new information with it

Question 10

what is direct matching?

Answer 10

the given information in the target sentence directly matches an antecedent in the context sentence

Question 11

what is bridging influence?

Answer 11

an inference based on information that we retrieve from memory to make a connection between two sentences

Question 12

what is a pronomial reference?

Answer 12

is the process of using a pronoun to refer to a previously stated noun

Question 13

info used for pronomial reference?

Answer 13

▪ Syntactic information (e.g., gender, number)
▪ Foregrounding, where a particular discourse concept is put into focus of attention by using some sort of attention-capturing device.
▪ General knowledge (e.g., about objects, actions, causal relationships)

Question 14

Inferences (i.e., elaborations) usually occur only when?

Answer 14

▪ they are needed for local coherence
▪ the elaborating concepts are easily activated by the discourse

Question 15

role of working memory?

Answer 15

There is a relationship between individual differences in WM and discourse comprehension

Question 16

memory for discourse?

Answer 16

3 levels:
- surface
- propositional
- situational

Question 17

surface representation?

Answer 17

• keeps the exact wording of a sentence.
• is short-lived except when wording is pragmatically significant (needed for full comprehension)

Question 18

propositional representation?

Answer 18

• keeps the meaning of the sentence
• is retained longer than the surface representation; midlife

Question 19

situational model?

Answer 19

• is the situation (events) described in the material.
• has the longest life – what we tend to remember best over time

Question 20

what is your schemata?

Answer 20

are generalized knowledge structures about objects or events

Question 21

what is a story grammar?

Answer 21

is a mental representation that specifies the expected sequence of story events