Because visual narratives demand complex inference abilities, they can potentially be used as a tool for developing inferential skills in other domains, like reading. The Inferential Language Comprehension (iLC) Framework proposes an approach to using visual narratives in educational settings to sponsor inference skills by building on cognitive, developmental, and language research.

Evidentiality refers to the linguistic marking of the nature/directness of source of evidence of an asserted event. Some languages (e.g., Turkish) mark source obligatorily in their grammar, while other languages (e.g., English) provide only lexical options for conveying source. The present study examined whether or under what conditions firsthand source information is relied on more than nonfirsthand sources in establishing discourse coherence. Turkish- and English-speaking participants read a series of somewhat incongruous two-sentence narratives and were to come up with a (...) way of completing each narrative so that it would form a coherent story. Each narrative contrasted two source types (firsthand vs. hearsay, firsthand vs. inference, or inference vs. hearsay) and two information types (general vs. particular information) each presented first or second. Analysis of story completions showed greater overall reliance on firsthand information when it was presented second and referred to a particular event. When the firsthand source occurred first and the particular event occurred second, the latter was favored, especially by Turkish participants. Taken together, the findings suggest that evidentiality interacts with information type in establishing discourse coherence and that both firsthand and particular information are relied on more when presented later rather than earlier in discourse. (shrink)

This article reviews the phenomena of disordered discourse often manifested in schizophrenia. It argues that the Structure Building Framework, a model of the general cognitive processes and mechanisms underlying discourse, can be used to account for these phenomena. According to the Structure Building Framework, the goal of comprehension is to build coherent mental representations or structures. Building a mental structure involves several component subprocesses: laying a foundation, mapping relevant information onto that foundation, and shifting to initiate a new substructure. Building (...) a mental structure also involves at least two general cognitive mechanisms: enhancement of relevant activation and suppression of irrelevant or inappropriate activation. We suggest that schizophrenics who exhibit verbose disordered discourse have inefficient suppression mechanisms, are impaired in laying a foundation, and tend to shift too often. We also speculate that schizophrenics who exhibit impoverished disordered discourse have inefficient enhancement mechanisms and are impaired with the cognitive process of mapping. (shrink)

It is a hallmark of natural language use that the way we talk about something reflects how it is represented in the mind of our conversation partner. This thesis studies the use and cognitive processing of referring expressions like one in comparison with other expression types in spoken Danish. The cognitive status of referents in other people’s minds can be understood in terms or referential givenness. The common view of givenness is that it constitutes a one-dimensional scale or continuum of (...) cognitive prominence. In opposition to this view, the present thesis assumes that givenness is partly composed of the dynamic referential features of accessibility and identifiability, two fundamental dimensions of givenness that are essentially free to vary independently of each other. A small corpus study of spoken Danish shows no differences between referent accessibility in indefinite and definite pronominal forms. Furthermore, referents of definite and indefinite forms clearly tend to differ with respect to identifiability. An experimental eye-tracking study provides evidence that there is no difference in the timecourse of the initiation of anaphoric reference resolution processes between expressions differing in definiteness marking and lexical explicitness. It is also shown, however, that the referential commitment of pronouns---both indefinite and definite---lag behind that of full noun phrases. Finally, an explorative dyadic eye-tracking study suggests that the moment-by-moment activation of referents in both speaker and listener vary as a function of lexical explicitness in indefinite forms. This result is consistent with the assumption that givenness differences associated with accessibility marking generalize to indefinite forms. All of these findings provide support for the new view of givenness proposed in the thesis. The dyadic eye-tracking methodology eventually arrived at in the thesis proves that it is possible to study language processing in unscripted, relatively natural dialogue in both speaker and listener simultaneously, and that interesting results can be obtained that are well worth the effort. (shrink)

A model is presented that addresses both the distribution and comprehension of different forms of referring expressions in language. This model is expressed in a formalism (Kamp & Reyle, 1993) that uses interpretive rules to map syntactic representations onto representations of discourse. Basic interpretive rules are developed for names, pronouns, definite descriptions, and quantified descriptions. These rules are triggered by syntactic input and interact dynamically with representations of discourse to establish reference and coreference. This interaction determines the ease with which (...) coreference can be established for different linguistic forms given the existing discourse context. The performance of the model approximates that observed in studies of intuitive judgments of grammaticality and studies using online measures of language comprehension. The model uses the same basic interpretive mechanisms for coreference within and between sentences, thereby linking the domain traditionally studied by generative linguists to domains that have been of concern primarily to psychologists and computational linguists. (shrink)

A fundamental aspect of human cognition is the ability to parse our constantly unfolding experience into meaningful representations of dynamic events and to communicate about these events with others. How do we communicate about events we have experienced? Influential theories of language production assume that the formulation and articulation of a linguistic message is preceded by preverbal apprehension that captures core aspects of the event. Yet the nature of these preverbal event representations and the way they are mapped onto language (...) are currently not well understood. Here, we review recent evidence on the link between event conceptualization and language, focusing on two core aspects of event representation: event roles and event boundaries. Empirical evidence in both domains shows that the cognitive representation of events aligns with the way these aspects of events are encoded in language, providing support for the presence of deep homologies between linguistic and cognitive event structure. (shrink)

This paper examines the role that linguistic and cognitive prominence play in the resolution of anaphor–antecedent relationships. In two experiments, we found that pronouns are immediately sensitive to the cognitive prominence of potential antecedents when other antecedent selection cues are uninformative. In experiment 1, results suggest that despite their theoretical dissimilarities, topic and contrastive focus both serve to enhance cognitive prominence. Results from experiment 2 suggest that the contrastive prosody appropriate for focus constructions may also play an important role in (...) enhancing cognitive prominence. Thus different types of linguistic prominence (topic, contrastive focus) appear to have the common effect of increasing the cognitive prominence of the discourse referent. For pronouns with two possible antecedents, the cognitive prominence of an antecedent aids in anaphor resolution, immediately biasing selection towards the more prominent (and ultimately preferred) antecedent. (shrink)

Pronoun interpretation is often described as relying on a comprehender's mental model of discourse. For example, in some psycholinguistic accounts, interpreting pronouns involves a process of retrieval, whereby a pronoun is resolved by accessing information from its linguistic antecedent. However, linguistic antecedents are neither necessary nor sufficient for interpreting a pronoun, and even when an antecedent has been introduced in earlier discourse, there is little evidence for the retrieval of linguistic form. The current study extends our understanding of pronoun interpretation (...) by examining whether the semantics of antecedent expressions are retrieved from representations of past discourse. Participants were instructed to move displayed objects in a Visual World eye-tracking task. In some cases, the semantics of the antecedent were no longer viable after an instruction was completed (e.g., “Move the house on the left to area 12,” where the result was that a different house is now the leftmost one). In this case, retrieving antecedent semantics at the point of hearing a subsequent pronoun (“Now, move it…”) should entail a processing penalty. Instead, the results showed that antecedent semantics have no direct effect on interpretation, raising additional questions about the role that retrieval might play in pronoun interpretation. (shrink)

Primary progressive aphasia is a degenerative disease affecting language while leaving other cognitive facilities relatively unscathed. The agrammatic subtype of PPA is characterized by agrammatic language production with impaired comprehension of noncanonical filler-gap syntactic structures, such as object-relatives [e.g., The sandwich that the girl ate was tasty], in which the filler is displaced from the object position within the relative clause to a position preceding both the verb and the agent and is replaced by a gap linked with the filler. (...) One hypothesis suggests that the observed deficits of these structures reflect impaired thematic integration, including impaired prediction of the thematic role of the filler and impaired thematic integration at the gap, but spared structure building. In the current study, we examined the on-line comprehension of object-relative and subject-relative clauses in healthy controls and individuals with agrammatic and logopenic PPA using eye-tracking. Eye-movement patterns in canonical subject-relative clause structures were essentially spared in both PPA groups. In contrast, eye-movement patterns in noncanonical object-relative clauses revealed delayed thematic prediction in both agrammatic and logopenic PPA, on-time structure building in both groups, and abnormal thematic integration in agrammatic, but not logopenic, PPA. We argue that these results are consistent with the hypothesis that agrammatic comprehension deficits reflect impaired thematic integration. (shrink)