The role of causal discourse structure in narrative writing

All writers produce text content and ideally connect it together according to discourse conventions. We investigate whether a particularly strong discourse convention, the need for causal coherence in narratives, can predict the kind of text writers will produce. Causality has been found to be a significant discourse factor in reading comprehension and hence can be expected to determine also what writers produce during composition. In Experiment 1, writers composed short continuations at various points throughout a simple narrative, whereas in Experiment 2, writers composed continuations to complete several narratives. The results indicate that causality indeed plays a major role in composition. Writers tend to produce new text in such a way that it is causally connected to the prior text. Furthermore, writers favored causal relations of necessity or of necessity and sufficiency while largely avoiding relations of sufficiency alone, which suggests a general discourse constraint to be maximally informative (e.g., Grice, 1975).     

Production of narrative discourse in aphasia

The study described the abilities of a group of 15 moderately impaired aphasics and 15 normals to produce narrative discourse. The experimental tasks included telling stories, summarizing stories, and giving morals to stories. The data were analyzed in terms of sentential grammar, discourse grammar, and subjective ratings of content and clarity of language. The results showed that aphasics produced well-structured discourse. The language of the aphasics' discourse was reduced in both complexity and amount, as compared to that produced by normals. The reduction of language reflected selective reduction of hierarchically organized information. The findings of the study confirm the results of previous research on mildly impaired aphasics, which also showed preservation of discourse structure with selective reduction of information.     

Effects of context-induced processing operations on semantic information acquired from discourse

Effects of context on processes involved in understanding discourse were investigated. An experimental context designed to directly affect discourse processing by inducing subjects to generate inferences involving text content was compared to a context in which subjects simply listened to and recalled the content of a text. The extent of inferential discourse processing was estimated from derived semantic information in subjects' text recalls. The experimental context produced effects on inferred and other derived information in subjects' text recalls which were predicted from a constructive model of discourse processing. Also consistent with this model, the amount of derived information increased with repeated exposures to the text. In a third condition, subjects repeatedly listened to the text in the experimental context, but only recalled it once on the last trial. The context produced very substantial effects on proportions of derived information under this condition. Context effects were still present one week later.     

The organization of narrative discourse in Lewy body spectrum disorder

Narrative discourse is an essential component of day-to-day communication, but little is known about narrative in Lewy body spectrum disorder (LBSD), including Parkinson’s disease (PD), Parkinson’s disease with dementia (PDD), and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). We performed a detailed analysis of a semi-structured speech sample in 32 non-aphasic patients with LBSD, and we related their narrative impairments to gray matter (GM) atrophy using voxel-based morphometry. We found that patients with PDD and DLB have significant difficulty organizing their narrative speech. This was correlated with deficits on measures of executive functioning and speech fluency. Regression analyses associated this deficit with reduced cortical volume in inferior frontal and anterior cingulate regions. These findings are consistent with a model of narrative discourse that includes executive as well as language components and with an impairment of the organizational component of narrative discourse in patients with PDD and DLB.     

The role of prosody in discourse processing

The influence of prosody and its visual analog, punctuation, in text comprehension was investigated in two experiments. In the first experiment 20 subjects listened to three taped passages of equal length and difficulty varying in intonation (normal, monotonous, or altered) and were tested on tasks of text comprehension and word recognition. In the second experiment 20 new subjects read the same passages but with varying punctuation (appropriate, no punctuation, or altered) and were also tested on text comprehension and word recognition. Subjects' reading time was also recorded. ANOVA results revealed that altered prosody and punctuation affect performance in a similar fashion and seriously impair text comprehension and word recognition. This sensitivity to altered intonation suggests that linguistic prosody not only supplies redundant cues for judging sentence structure but that it also manages attentional resources to help with semantic encoding of lexical units and with the organization of linguistic information in long term memory.     

Openness in processing social information among attachment types

Previous empirical and theoretical work suggests differences among attachment types with regard to their openness in perceiving and organizing social information. To examine these hypothesized differences, participants were given two sets of information characterizing the same target person, one set depicting an insecurely attached person, the other portraying a securely attached person. Proposed differences in openness to incorporating new information, differentiation in cognitive representations of others, and recall were assessed. As hypothesized, avoidant individuals were less open to new information than were secure subjects, and they differentiated their representations less than did both secure and anxious-ambivalent individuals. Moreover, as expected, there were no significant differences between secure and anxious-ambivalent individuals on the dimensions of openness and differentiation. However, avoidant individuals did not evidence poorer recall of the stimulus material. Theoretical and clinical implications of avoidant individuals’relatively more rigid, simplistic models of others are explored.     

Neurofunctional (re)organization underlying narrative discourse processing in aging: evidence from fNIRS

Relatively few studies have analyzed the mechanisms underlying the cognitive changes that affect language in the elderly, and fewer have done so for narrative discourse. The goal of this study was to explore the neurofunctional changes associated with aging for different components of narrative discourse. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and behavioral data on 10 younger adults and 10 healthy elderly participants were collected. Ten younger adults in a non-proficient second language condition were included to explore the possibility that the age-related neurofunctional reorganization partly expresses demanding resource allocation. Results show within- and across-hemispheric differences in the neurofunctional pattern of activation in the older participants with reference to the younger ones, partially shared with the low-proficiency young adults, providing support for the recognized mechanisms underlying neural reserve and compensation. fNIRS was shown to be appropriate for studying the age-related neurofunctional reorganization of complex cognitive abilities.     

Contextual influences on narrative discourse in normal young adults

In an effort to provide some expectation regarding the influences of task and rehearsal, the narrative ability of 20 normal young adults was examined under the conditions of story retelling and story generation. Each task was repeated after a 1-week interval in order to investigate a possible practice effect. Sentence production, intersentential cohesion, and story grammar organization were analyzed. Results indicated that the subjects' performance varied as a function of task presentation as well as the measure used to describe narrative production. The only across-trials difference noted was an increase in cohesive adequacy from trial 1 to trial 2 for one of the story generation tasks. It may be concluded that (a) context does influence the manner and competence of narrative presentation, and (b) that rehearsal of a complex narrative improves narrative coherence.     

Production of narrative and procedural discourse in aphasia

The study described the abilities of a group of 10 aphasics and 10 normals to produce narrative and procedural discourse. The experimental tasks included telling stories, producing summaries, giving morals to the stories, and producing procedures. The variables examined in the investigation included features of sentential grammars, such as amount of embedding, and features of discourse grammars, such as occurrence of elements of superstructure in narrative. Additionally, raters assessed the content and clarity of the discourses. The results showed that aphasics produced well-structured narrative and procedural discourse. Aphasics' discourse errors differed only in degree, not qualitatively, from those of normals. The language of the aphasics' discourses was reduced in both complexity and amount. It was found that the aphasics had difficulties in producing summaries and giving morals for the stories when compared with the normals. Both the content and clarity of the discourses produced by the aphasics were rated lower than those produced by the normals.     

副中央凹中字N+2的预视对汉语阅读眼跳目标选择影响的眼动研究

采用边界范式, 在副中央凹呈现一个双字词或两个单字词, 操纵字N+2的预视(目标预视和假字预视), 来考察副中央凹中词汇特征是否影响读者随后的眼跳长度及注视位置。结果发现, 读者能够获得字N+2的预视; 双字词与两个单字词条件下注视位置没有显著地差异; 当副中央凹中为双字词时, 字N+2为目标预视时随后的眼跳长度显著地长于假字预视条件, 随后的注视位置距离词首更远; 当副中央凹中为两个单字词时, 两种预视条件下随后的眼跳长度及注视位置没有显著的差异。本研究结果提示：在汉语阅读中, 读者能够对字N+2进行预视加工, 这种加工的影响只发生在当副中央凹中为双字词时。     

Informative content of narrative discourse in right-brain-damaged right-handers

Thirty-six right-brain-damaged (RBD) right-handers and 20 controls (C) were submitted to a narrative production task using the pictorial representation of a trivial story. Each subject's narrative was analyzed, using a “propositional analysis,” in order to study amount as well as nature of informative content. Results show (a) that RBD subjects' narratives contain a smaller amount of information that did not appear to be related to a smaller amount of verbal output or to the presence of a visual neglect, (b) that the information contained in RBD subjects' narratives appears to be a subset of that contained in C subjects' narratives, and (c) that these results do not pertain to all C or RBD subjects, since both groups are nonhomogeneous. Even though these results are not linked to the presence of some visual neglect or visual agnosia per se, they could be, at least in part, the expression of some degree of perceptive difficulties of the iconography. However, they are also interpreted as expressing a problem with the organization of narrative discourse at levels of cognitive processing which may not be exclusive to language, but which are nonetheless essential for discourse organization.     

Adult-child discourse: Developmental interaction between information processing and linguistic knowledge

In the present study, the discourse interaction between adult and child was examined in terms of the content of their utterances, and the linguistic and contextual relations between their messages, in order to investigate how children use the information from adults' input sentences to form contingent responses. The analyses described were based on longitudinal data from four children from approximately 21 to 36 months of age. Categories of child discourse, their development and their interactions with aspects of prior adult utterances form the major results of the study. Child utterances were identified as adjacent (immediately preceded by an adult utterance), or as nonadjacent (not immediately preceded by an adult utterance). Adjacent utterances were either contingent (shared the same topic and added new information relative to the topic of the prior utterance), imitative (shared the same topic but did not add new information), or noncontingent (did not share the same topic). From the beginning, the adjacent speech was greater than nonadjacent speech. Contingent speech increased over time; in particular, linguistically contingent speech (speech that expanded the verb relation of the prior adult utterance with added or replaced constituents within a clause) showed the greatest developmental increase. Linguistically contingent speech occurred more often after questions than nonquestions. The results are discussed in terms of how the differential requirements for processing information in antecedent messages is related to language learning.     

Cognitive structures in comprehension and memory of narrative discourse

The effects of structure and content variables on memory and comprehension of prose passages were studied in two experiments. The experimental passages exemplify a class of simple narrative stories that is described by a generative grammar of plot structures. A comprehension model is proposed that assumes a hierarchical organizational framework of stories in memory, determined by the grammar, representing the abstract structural components of the plot. The quality and characteristics of subjects' memory for stories were tested on a variety of experimental tasks in which story organization was manipulated. Comprehensibility and recall were found to be a function of the amount of inherent plot structure in the story, independent of passage content. Recall probability of individual facts from passages depended on the structural centrality of the facts: Subjects tended to recall facts corresponding to high-level organizational story elements rather than lower-level details. In addition, story summarizations from memory tended to emphasize general structural characteristics rather than specific content. For successively presented stories, both structure and content manipulations influenced recall. Furthermore, repeating story structure across two passages produced facilitation in recall of the second passage, while repeating story content produced proactive interference. The implications for a model of memory for narrative discourse are discussed.     

The flow of narrative in the mind unmoored: An account of narrative processing

Verbal narratives provide incomplete information and can be very long, yet readers and hearers often effortlessly fill in the gaps and make connections across long stretches of text, sometimes even finding this immersive. How is this done? In the last few decades, event-indexing situation modeling and complementary accounts of narrative emotion have suggested answers. Despite this progress, comparisons between real-life perception and narrative experience might underplay the way narrative processing modifies our world model, as well as the role of the emotions that do not relate to characters. I reframe narrative experience in predictive processing and neural networks, capturing continuity between fiction, perception, and states like dreaming and imagination, enabled by the flexible instantiation of concepts. In this framework, narrative experience is more clearly revealed as a creative experience that can share some of the phenomenology of dreams.     

The influence of global discourse on lexical ambiguity resolution

The influence of global discourse on the resolution of lexical ambiguity was examined in a series of naming experiments. Two-sentence passages were constructed to bias either the dominant or the subordinate meaning of a homonym that was embedded in a locally ambiguous sentence. The results provided evidence for the immediate (0-msec interstimulus interval) resolution of lexical ambiguity and were subsequently replicated in Experiment 2, in which an 80-msec stimulus onset asynchrony exposure duration was employed for the homonyms. Strong dominant and subordinate biased discourse contexts activated only the contextually appropriate sense of a homonym. In Experiment 3, each sentence of the discourse was presented in isolation. The pattern of activation obtained in Experiments 1 and 2 was found to be contingent on the integration of the two sentences to construct an overall global discourse representation of the text. The results support a context-sensitive model of lexical ambiguity resolution.     

The influence of referential discourse context on modifier attachment in Dutch

In an eye-tracking experiment we investigated the influence of referential context on the attachment of a relative clause to two possible hosts (as in "Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony"). The attachment of the relative clause was disambiguated grammatically at the first word after the onset of the ambiguity in order to investigate immediate effects of discourse. The contexts had been verified in a sentence completion study to make sure that they induced a strong bias toward early or late closure. The results of the reading experiment, however, revealed no significant interaction of referential context with the attachment preference of the relative clause. The only robust and consistent effect we found was a preference for early closure, independent of the preceding context. These data favor accounts positing that referential context does not influence the initial attachment decision, but does play a role in later phases of sentence processing.     

Perceiving a part and the whole of narrative scenes with interactive processing between character and surroundings

Visual recognition is a fast and accurate process. This study adopted a progressive revelation task which demonstrated the dynamic visual process to investigate narrative scene perception. Experiment 1 examined the recognition of character and surroundings that are presented in isolation. The results demonstrated an accumulation of perceptual evidence for recognition as a psychometric function, and character identification was found to be superior to surroundings identification (character advantage effect). Experiment 2 examined the character and surroundings identification in isolated and concurrent presentations. The results showed that less accumulated evidence was required for the concurrent condition than for the isolated condition in the surroundings identification but not in the character identification. The character advantage effect only appeared in the isolated condition. In Experiment 3, both the character and surroundings in semantically consistent or inconsistent scenes were reported. The results showed that consistency effects appeared in both character and surroundings reporting, and the character advantage effect appeared in both consistent and inconsistent conditions. Overall, the results of the present study, which have high ecological validity, supported the existence of an interactive relationship between the visual processing of character and surroundings in narrative scene perception.     

Forgetting of verbatim information in discourse

In tree experiments, the causes of forgetting of verbatim information in discourse were investigated. In experiment 1, we tested the view that the surface form of a sentence decays when linguistic elements are integrated into larger discourse structures. Contrary to such a view, the results showed that when text could be integrated, both content and verbatim memory improved. In Experiment 2, we examined the possibility that task instructions could influence the level of memory for exact wording and content. The results showed that although task did influence the amount of verbatim memory, it did not affect memory for content. Experiment 3 was an investigation of the degree to which subjects would spontaneously encode surface information on the basis of the social interactiveness of the sentences. Past research has shown that verbatim memory for insults, jokes, and other personal utterances is quite good. In this experiment, identical sentences were tested in texts that had high versus low interactiveness. Verbatim memory was much higher for the same sentences in the highly interactive context. A pragmatic account of verbatim memory is given to explain how content and instructions influence the encoding of surface form.     

Heuristic processing of distinctiveness information in minority and majority influence

The role of distinctiveness information in majority and minority influence was studied. Students read a message containing strong or weak arguments advocated by a minority or majority source. The communicator's minority (majority) status was said to be either distinctive to the target topic or nondistinctive across topics. Major dependent variables were attitude judgments and cognitive responses. Across conditions, messages were processed systematically, and a majority communicator tended to be more persuasive than a minority communicator. Most importantly, high distinctiveness led to greater influence than low distinctiveness, and this effect was independent of argument strength and minority versus majority status. Theoretical and applied implications of these findings are discussed. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.