Comprehension and memory of the literal and figurative meaning of proverbs

Proverbs were used to examine recognition memory for four types of sentence information (figurative meaning, literal meaning, lexical information, syntactic information) with two levels of comprehension. Forced-choice recognition tasks showed that subjects were successful in remembering all four types of information. Recognition scores for the figurative meaning of unfamiliar proverbs presented in isolation were above chance and were also significantly improved when procedures were employed which encouraged comprehension of this level of meaning. The results are most consistent with theories of comprehension which provide for different types of processing for figurative and literal language.     

道教和谚语

我将中国道教信仰和民间口头文学联系起来研究,是从上世纪80年代中期开始的,其间经中国道教协会研究室李养正先生鼓励与支持,撰写成《道教与中国民间文学》一书,于91年交付文津出版社,作为“道教文化丛书”的首册在海峡对岸的台北市出版。问世后激起的热烈反响超出我的预料,旅居海外多年的民间文艺学家谭达先,在《民间文学论坛》上刊出长篇书评《喜读刘守华的道教与中国民间文学———兼谈道教与谚语、谜语的关系》,此文特别吸引我的地方,并不在于它的那些溢美之词,如称本书“达到了独创、新颖、深刻的境界,给中国道教与民间文学研究打开了…     

Counseling and Comprehension of the Economics of Change

This article invites counselors to transform their personal perspectives on the processes of being economic and offers an experience of comprehension. A fundamental economic process is that of interdependently creating value. Historically, the conceived basis of value has evolved to a presently emerging conception of the provision of ideas as capital. Mastery and practice of comprehension is necessary to integrate this conception into the ideals and practice of schooling. Experiencing comprehension suggests means of using its process as the content of counseling. Consequently, the counseling goal, personally achieved comprehension through application of economic principles in guidance procedures, contributes to this creation of value.     

Sets and Plural Comprehension

The state of affairs of some things falling under a predicate is supposedly a single entity that collects these things as its constituents. But whether we think of a state of affairs as a fact, a proposition or a possibility, problems will arise if we adopt a plural logic. For plural logic says that any plurality include themselves, so whenever there are some things, the state of affairs of their plural self-inclusion should be a single thing that collects them all. This leads to paradoxes analogous to those that afflict naïve set theory. Here I suggest that they are the very same paradoxes, because sets can be reduced to states of affairs. However, to obtain a consistent theoretical reduction we must restrict the usual axiom scheme of Comprehension for plural logic to ‘stratified’ formulas, to avoid viciously circular definitions. I prove that with this modification to the background plural logic, the theory of states of affairs is consistent; moreover, it yields the axioms of the familiar set theory NFU.     

Comprehension and belief structure

Abstract.— A reader's belief structure is suggested to affect the way he processes incoming information. It is analyzed in terms of what propositions the reader regards as true (the truth values) and of how the reader discriminates between propositions as to truth value (the discrimination index). In a study on 20 psychology students, the comprehension task involved matching single statements to a previously read text. The statements represented two different ideas, whereas the text represented only one. The subjects' belief structure in terms of statements accepted (truth value) and statements discriminated as to truth value (discrimination index) was related to the way in which they matched the same Statements to the previously read text (comprehension). Truth values and discrimination indices together were found to account for 39% of the interindividual variation in comprehension after the first reading and for 50 % of that variation after the second reading. It is suggested that a reader, when confronted with a new text, arrives at the most probable interpretation of that text by turning to his own belief structure.     

Comprehension of pronouns

An experiment is reported in which subjects had to choose referents for pronouns in sentences such as: John blamed Bill because he spilt the coffee. To examine whether the choice of referent is influenced by features of the main verb or by the events described in the sentence, the relation between the events was altered by changing the conjunction. A significant effect of conjunction was obtained, but only when both antecedents matched the gender of the pronoun. When only one antecedent matched the pronoun, referents were chosen faster. From these results it is argued that readers use general knowledge to select referents for pronouns when gender does not identify a unique referent. A further effect of sentence structure on the time taken to select a referent was interpreted as showing that subjects analysed the sentences clause by clause.     

Familiarity with proverbs and performance of a black population on Gorham's Proverbs Test

The Gorham Proverbs Test was administered to 278 black participants residing in a large metropolitan area in Southern California. Respondents were also asked to indicate whether they were familiar with each of the 40 proverbs in the test. Scores were significantly affected by respondents' ages, education, and perceived childhood socioeconomic status. Familiarity with a proverb increased the probability of its correct interpretation. Familiarity of proverbs and attempts to interpret them were significantly associated, that is, respondents tended not to attempt interpretation of unfamiliar proverbs. The number of familiar proverbs per test was not significantly associated with respondents' test scores. The mean Abstract score obtained in this study was comparable to mean scores previously reported in the literature, suggesting that ethnic differences do not significantly affect performance on the Proverbs Test.     

语篇理解中语境对代词理解的影响

该研究考察了语篇理解中整体语境和局部语境对代词理解的影响。向被试呈现语篇,其中包括带有语义偏向的整体语境和局部语境以及代词。要求被试判断代词的所指。结果发现,当代词和整体语境出现时,被试并不立刻判断,等局部语境也出现以后,才判断代词的先行词。这一结果支持“首先建立句子袭征,再把句子表征与语篇表征相整合”的分阶段加工观点。     

Depression and the interpretation of ambiguity

A number of studies have produced findings consistent with the possibility that depressives display a negative bias in interpretation. However, the results of such studies can equally well be explained by the operation of a depression-linked response bias, reflecting an elevated tendency for depressives to emit or endorse negatively-toned response options. The present experiment compares the patterns of interpretative processing displayed by subjects who differ in their BDI scores, using a priming methodology developed by anxiety researchers to eliminate the contaminating influence of emotional response bias. The pattern of priming effects obtained provides no evidence to support the existence of a negative interpretative bias in the more depressive individuals. Indeed, quite the reverse conclusion is sustained by the findings, which indicate that high BDI subjects showed an attenuated tendency to activate the more negative interpretations of the ambiguous textual stimuli. The conceptual and methodological implications of these findings are discussed, together with some specific suggestions for future research on this topic.     

Comprehension and memory for pictures

The thesis advanced is that people remember nonsensical pictures much better if they comprehend what they are about. Two experiments supported this thesis. In the first, nonsensical "droodles" were studied by subjects with or without an accompanying verbal interpretation of the pictures. Free recall was much better for subjects receiving the interpretation during study. Also, a later recognition test showed that subjects receiving the interpretation rated as more similar to the original picture a distractor which was close to the prototype of the interpreted category. In Experiment II, subjects studied pairs of nonsensical pictures, with or without a linking interpretation provided. Subjects who heard a phrase identifying and interrelating the pictures of a pair showed greater associative recall and matching than subjects who received no interpretation. The results suggest that memory is aided whenever contextual cues arouse appropriate schemata into which the material to be learned can be fitted.     

Comprehension of the representational mind in infancy

A broad array of infant studies are reviewed that appear to be consistent with the idea that belief understanding specifically, and mental attribution generally, emerge much earlier than previously acknowledged. We first examine existing false-belief research, which, while confirming that children under 4 years perform poorly on standard tests, suggests nevertheless that they have more implicit understanding of beliefs than they can express. After surveying theories that both favor and reject early development of theory of mind (TOM), we address two recent bodies of visual fixation research that provide support for the possibility of knowledge and belief attribution in infancy. The first indicates that infants of 13–15 months are sensitive to others’ false beliefs (and therefore have a representational TOM), the second, that by 12 months or younger infants have two antecedently related psychological understandings: (a) that when agents look they “see” and (b) that seeing plays a presumptive role in producing knowledge. This raises the broader question of whether “mentalism” might be part of core knowledge, which takes us to the earliest manifestation of psychological attribution, the construal of agentive behavior as intentional. Contrary to previous assumptions, recent studies indicate that infants of 3–9 months do not accord intentionality exclusively to humans or to self-propelled objects but rather to any entity that: (1) chooses flexibly among means and ends, (2) responds non-randomly to social overtures, and (3) reacts rationally to changing circumstances (i.e., that is not a mere automaton but is selectively and adaptively responsive to the environment). Other evidence is then examined which suggests that infants begin to construe these and other behaviors in mentalist rather than teleological terms much earlier than expected. Finally, the implications of this empirical record for domain-specific and domain-general theories of TOM are considered.     

Dynamic Text Comprehension

Abstract— Reading is one of the most complex and uniquely human of cognitive activities. Our understanding of the processes and factors involved in text comprehension is quite impressive, but it also is fragmented, with a proliferation of "mini-theories" for specific components that in reality are intertwined and interact with one another. Theories of dynamic text comprehension (DTC) aim to capture the integration of these components. They depict reading comprehension as an ongoing process involving fluctuations in the activation of concepts as the reader proceeds through the text, resulting in a gradually emerging interpretation of the material. Features of texts and characteristics of the reader jointly and interactively affect these fluctuations, influencing and being influenced by the reader's understanding and memory of what is read. We illustrate the DTC approach by describing one theory, called the Landscape model, and summarize how its simulations match empirical data. We conclude with some implications of the DTC framework for basic and applied reading research.