Text Comprehension

Question 1

Comprehension: Three main areas

Answer 1

Interpreting speaker’s/listener’s meaning
• Linking the sentences (inferences)
• Extracting the meaning from the text as a
whole.

Question 2

Interpreting the writer/speaker’s

intention

Answer 2

Speaker meaning: semantics and pragmatics
• Utterances have surface forms, which signal a speech act:
e.g. declarative statement, question, imperative command, etc.
• Direct speech acts: straightforward utterances in which the intention of the speaker is
revealed by the literal meaning of the words.
– E.g. “Shut the door.”
• Indirect speech acts: the literal meaning of an utterance is not the intended one. E.g.:
– “Could you pass the salt?”
– “Would you mind shutting the door?”

Question 3

Types of inferences

Answer 3

Logical inferences: follow from the meanings of words.
• E.g. if John is a bachelor, John is male
• Bridging inferences (necessary inferences):
• need to be made to establish coherence between parts of text.
E.g. “Fred got a drink out of his rucksack. Unfortunately, the
orange juice was warm”

Question 4

Inferences & Memory for Text

Answer 4

Verbatim memory is notoriously unreliable:
• We “remember” things that didn’t actually
happen.
• We forget the details of word order quickly.
• We remember only the meaning of what we read
or hear, not the details.

Prior knowledge can also lead to misremembering

Question 5

Verbatim Memory for Text - Sachs

Answer 5

Subjects heard a sentence such as
(1) embedded in a story, and later tested their ability to
distinguish it from other sentences which differed from
the original in systematic ways:
1. He sent a letter about it to Galileo, the great Italian scientist
(ORIGINAL).
2. He sent Galileo, the great Italian scientist, a letter about it. (WORD
ORDER CHANGE).
3. A letter about it was sent to Galileo, the great Italian scientist
(SYNTACTIC CHANGE).
4. Galileo, the great Italian scientist, sent him a letter about it
(SEMANTIC CHANGE).
She tested their memory at various delays: 0, 80, 160
syllables later

Results - You forget the form of the sentence, but remember themeaning

Question 6

Bartlett’s - “Schema Theory”

Answer 6

Presented people with stories that conflicted
with their prior knowledge.
• Subjects attempted free recall at various
time intervals (15 mins - several days).
Bartlett: memory is determined not only by what
is presented, but also by prior knowledge a person
brings to the story.
Bartlett argued that precise details are forgotten
over time, whereas memory for the more general
schema remains

Question 7

Kintsch: The Construction-Integration

Model (Kintsch, 1998)

Answer 7

Forgetting of surface, propositional and situation

information over a 4-day period