Language Comprehension as Structure Building

Language Comprehension as Structure Building

This book is the result of the author's impressive research program on language comprehension. It describes her theory of discourse processing, the Structure Building Framework, and many innovative experiments supporting the Framework. Although introduced in the context of reading, the Structure Building Framework is a general theory of comprehension. The Framework emphasizes the processes that culminate in mental structures rather than the structures themselves. Gernsbacher introduces five cognitive processes that build structures representing clauses, sentences, and passages:

The Process of Laying a Foundation
The Process of Mapping
The Process of Shifting
The Enhancement Mechanism
The Suppression Mechanism

First, the reader lays the foundation for the representation of the text, and then maps subsequent information to the growing structure or creates a new substructure depending on the similarity among the segments of the text. If the text is coherent, the reader maps the information on the existing structure. Otherwise she shifts to a new structure.

The Structure Building Framework has a neural flavor. The constituent elements of the mental structures are memory cells that have a base activation level, much like neurons do. The activation level depends on the coherence of incoming sentences. Once activated these cells remain active and activation spreads to similar cells, reflecting the process of enhancement. If information does not cohere with prior information, activation is dampened, reflecting the mechanism of suppression.

The three processes modulate the mental load, while the two mechanisms affect the level of activation of memory cells. Laying a foundation and shifting are resource consuming, they place a load on the cognitive processor and result in longer reading times. Mapping involves the integration of familiar content within existing structures; this process is easier and allows quicker reading and shorter reading times. Enhancement results in greater activation of memory cells and faster recognition speeds for the content in those structures. Suppression. on the other hand, reduces activation, making content less available, and slowing recognition speeds. The book has six chapters, including an introduction in Chapter 1 and a conclusion in Chapter 6. The second is devoted to the process of laying a foundation; the third chapter discusses the mapping and shifting processes; and the fourth chapter describes Gernsbacher's research on the suppression and enhancement mechanisms. The fifth chapter examines individual differences in suppression and enhancement.

Handbook of Psycholinguistics

Handbook of Psycholinguistics

The Handbook of Psycholinguistics, in one volume, provides a single source, state of the art review of the many subdisciplines in this area. Written by the leading experts in the field, each chapter provides both depth and breadth in covering dynamic research findings on the acquisition, perception, and comprehension of language. Now in its third decade of existence, the field has never before had a comprehensive reference source. The handbook discusses research, theory, and methodology, while never compromising the unique integration of psychology and linguistics fundamental to this field.

Coherence in Spontaneous Text

Coherence in Spontaneous Text

What does it mean for a text to be "coherent?" The contributors to this volume have struggled with this fundament, but perplexing, question. Their answers are provocative, insightful, and surprising in their overall coherence. The theme that binds the collection of papers in this volume is, simply put, that coherence is a mental phenomenon. Coherence is not an inherent property of a written or spoken text. Readers or listeners can indeed judge with high agreement that one text is more coherent than another. But neither the words on the page nor the words in the speech stream of themselves confer coherence. And although a less coherent text impedes comprehension, neither the printed sentences nor the spoken utterances cause those impediments.

Coherence is a property of what emerges during speech production and comprehension: the mentally represented text, and in particular the mental process that partake in constructing that mental representation. A coherently produced text - spoken or written - allows the "receiver" (listener or reader) to form roughly the same text-representation as the 'sender' (writer or speaker) had in mind. To the extent that the sender's mental representation was coherent to begin with, and to the extent that the receiver's mental representation matched that of the sender's, the text is coherent.

In producing and comprehending a text, be it spoken or written, the interlocutors collaborate towards coherence, negotiating for the common ground of shared topicality, reference, and thematic structure- thus toward a similar mental representations. During conversation, the negotiation takes place collaboratively between two (or more) active participants. During writing, revision and editing, the negotiation occurs cognitively between the writer's own mental representation and his mental representation of what he/she assumes the reader knows. Conversation-spontaneous face-to-face communication - is thus the primary evolutionary template that shaped the cognitive mechanisms of text production and comprehension. Non-conversational text merely piggybacks on these fundamentally interactive mechanisms. This view of coherence emphasizes the speaker's and writers' ongoing effort to achieve coherence with their listeners or readers. The measurable litmus test for success is then the readers' and listeners' coherent comprehension. Coherence thus emerges not in the text, but in the two collaborating minds.

Anne Anderson presents a striking demonstration of how participants in conversation negotiate for coherence in a laboratory problem-solving task. Her subjects draw on common landmarks and negotiated utterances to achieve their goals. Anderson also demonstrates the developmental course of negotiation. Her data strongly support the hypothesis that negotiating for coherence during discourse is a skill that must be acquired.

Jennifer Coates tackle the questions of the Wittgensteinean extreme bounds of coherence-tautology and contradiction. The first represents maximal coherence to the point of manifest redundancy; the second represents minimal coherence. Working from conversational texts, Coates shows how speakers negotiate instances of both tautology and contradiction, so that what could - from a purely logical perspective - be either redundant or incoherent acquires communicative coherence during the process of negotiation.

T. Givon frames the main theme of the volume, that coherence is fundamentally not a property of the text but rather of the mind that produces or interprets the text. Cognitively, coherence is constructed with the aid of both domain-specific (lexical) knowledge and grammatical processing cues. Both processes contribute to the construction of both local and global coherence links.

Charles Goodwin demonstrates the flexible, negotiable nature of the coherence that emerges during conversation, where both local and global construction of what is 'the topic' contribute to specific coherent interpretations of the communication.

Walter Kintsch explores the contrast between knowledge-driven and grammar-driven processes of building coherence, suggesting that the two mechanisms operate in parallel as 'strong' vs. 'weak' text-comprehension strategies, respectively.

Tony Sanford and Linda Moxey argue that coherence must be 'in the head.' They illustrate this with texts that are stylistically cohesive but communicatively incoherent. Their subjects, in comprehension tasks, fail to comprehend the meaning intended by the texts' authors because they overly-activate their associated knowledge.

Tom Trabasso, Soyoung Suh and Paula Payton investigate the emergence of global coherence links during comprehension. Their laboratory experiments outline the mental representations that must be activated in readers' mind for successful comprehension.

Matthew Traxler and Morton Ann Gernsbacher argue that writers also negotiate for coherence. During writing, negotiation for coherence is considerably more difficult because the writer's or editor's audiences is not available as active collaborators. Instead, the writer must envision - indeed imagine - the mental representation that the written texts would prompt in the reader's mind. To the extent that the writer is successful in guessing the emerging text-representation in the reader's mind, the written text will judged by readers to be more coherent.

Deanna Wilkes-Gibbs presents both arguments for and laboratory demonstration of the way participants in conversation negotiate for coherence. Conversation participants engage in turn taking and question asking to establish common ground and mutual representation. Moreover, listeners' memory representations are greatly affected by their assessment of common meaning as they converse.

Most of the papers in this volume were originally presented at the symposium on Coherence in Spontaneous Text, held at the University of Oregon in the spring of 1992. We are indebted to the Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences at the University of Oregon, the Keck Foundation of Los Angeles, and the Shaolin-West Foundation of Durango, Colorado for their financial support; to Vonda Evans for logistic support on site; and to our publishers, John Benjamins of Amsterdam, for seeing merit in the volume and taking it on sight unseen.

Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society

Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society

The field of cognitive science exists to promote cross-disciplinary integration of concepts, methods, epistemologies, language, data, and infrastructures for research and education on cognition. The empirical and theoretical base of cognitive science itself sheds significant light on the nature and complexity of its interdisciplinary enterprise. Yet, relatively little has been written about interdisciplinarity as an object of study within cognitive science. Because examination of this topic has significant potential to advance theory and inform professional practice within the community of cognitive scientists, we - the co-organizers of the 1998 annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society - chose interdisciplinarity as the conference theme.

The theme of interdisciplinarity was reflected in several ways during the four-day conference, which was held on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, August 1 - 4, 1998. During the opening session John T. Bruer, President of the James S. McDonnell Foundation, addressed the entire conference with his presentation, "Cognitive Science: Inter- and Intra-Disciplinary Collaboration." Two invited symposia specifically addressed interdisciplinarity as an object of empirical and theoretical research. The first, organized by Rogers Hall and titled, "Analyses of Work Across Disciplinary Boundaries" brought together scholars from linguistics, psychology, and library and information science to examine the nature of cognition within interdisciplinary practice, taken as a recurrent and important feature of our culture. Based on ecological studies representing a range of approaches and settings, each speaker offered a theoretical account of how interdisciplinary activity is structured and represented. The second symposium, organized by Christian Schunn and titled, "The Interdisciplinarity of Cognitive Science," brought together scholars from the fields of psychology, philosophy and computer science to critically examine the history, status and nature of interdisciplinary collaboration within the field of cognitive science. At the time of the conference, the texts of the plenary address and invited symposia were being developed as core chapters for an edited volume. In organizing these talks and arranging for their publication, our intent was to motivate reflective discussions of practice and community within the cognitive science society, in addition to promoting research and discourse on interdisciplinarity.

Our CogSci98 program promoted interdisciplinary integration in traditional ways, as well. For example, cross-disciplinary community was encouraged through several invited tutorial symposia designed to educate and broaden a general cognitive science audience. As in previous years' programs, the topics of these tutorial symposia were those likely to hold general interest to the cognitive science community but not typically well represented at the annual meeting. They included Communication Disorders, Computational Vision, Evolutionary Cognition, Educational Dialog, Affective Neuroscience, and Math and Science Education. Each tutorial comprised three survey talks by a leading researcher and time for audience questions and discussion. Emphasis was placed on the tutorial nature of these talks and the breadth of the audience. Five of the six tutorials represent cognitive science strengths of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and were organized through the generosity of our Wisconsin colleagues.

Also, a traditional general "Call for Papers" was issued to the full society and beyond, encouraging submissions for symposia, spoken papers, full posters, and abstract posters (a feature introduced in 1996). Submitted presentations were evaluated for their ability to transcend their disciplinary boundaries and truly address the breadth of the community of cognitive scientists, in addition to being evaluated for their technical and theoretical merit. More general papers and symposia were scheduled on the spoken program, and more specialized topics were assigned to poster sessions. Submitted presentations are represented in these proceedings as "long papers" (those presented as spoken presentations and "full-posters" at the conference) and "short papers" (those presented as "abstract posters" by members of the Cognitive Science Society).

Last but not least, the theme of interdisciplinarity was captured in our CogSci98 logo, inspired by the late Donald T. Campbell. Well-known as a methodologist, Campbell was also a scholar of interdisciplinarity. He held that a comprehensive multiscience must form a continuous texture of narrow specialties that overlap with one another. "Interdisciplinary programs have been misled by goals of breadth and multidisciplinary training." What must be recognized, he argued, is that interdisciplinarity is a collective product, not embodied within any one scholar. It is achieved through the fact that multiple narrow specialties overlap; through this overlap a collective communication, a collective competence, and "omniscience" is achieved. Probably with tongue in cheek, Campbell named his theory "the fishscale model of omniscience." The Conference Organizers purchased a commemorative tile at the Frank Lloyd Wright Monona Terrace Convention Center, the site of our conference social, engraved with our fishscale model of Cognitive Science. The CogSci98 logo tile serves as a tribute to our most recent act of collective communication, collective competence, and collective good humor our co-organization of this conference and its program.

Handbook of Discourse Processes

Handbook of Discourse Processes

This Handbook is a comprehensive overview of the multidisciplinary field of discourse processes.

The editors hope to foster a more interdisciplinary approach to discourse processing with this Handbook, while simultaneously developing an appreciation within the field for multiple methods of establishing rigorous scientific claims.

The field of discourse processes is currently fueled by seven dominant approaches:

The contributors also discuss future trends in research, including corpus analyses, the intergration of neuroscience with discourse research, and the development of more advanced computer technologies for analyzing discourse.

Interdisciplinary Collaboration: An Emerging Cognitive Science

Interdisciplinary Collaboration: An Emerging Cognitive Science

Interdisciplinary Collaboration calls attention to a serious need to study the problems and processes of interdisciplinary inquiry, to reflect on the current state of scientific knowledge regarding interdisciplinary collaboration, and to encourage research that studies interdisciplinary cognition in relation to the ecological contexts in which it occurs. It contains reflections and research on interdisciplinarity found in a number of different contexts by practitioners and scientists from a number of disciplines and several chapters represent attempts by cognitive scientists to look critically at the cognitive science enterprise itself. Representing all of the seven disciplines listed in the official logo of the Cognitive Science Society and its journal--anthropology, artificial intelligence, education, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology--this book is divided into three parts:

Interdisciplinary Collaboration is intended for scholars at the graduate level and beyond in cognitive science and education.

Handbook of Psycholinguistics, Second Edition

With psycholinguistics in its fifth decade of existence, the second edition of the Handbook of Psycholinguistics represents a comprehensive survey of psycholinguistic theory, research, and methodology, with special emphasis on the very best empirical research conducted in the past decade. Thirty leading experts have been brought together to present the reader with both broad and detailed current issues in Language Production, Comprehension and Development. The handbook is an indispensable single-source guide for professional researchers, graduate students, advanced undergraduates, university and college teachers, and other professionals in the fields of psycholinguistics, language comprehension, reading, neuropsychology of language, linguistics, language development, and computational modeling of language. It will also be a general reference for those in neighboring fields such as cognitive and developmental psychology and education.