Language comprehenders retain implied shape and orientation of objects

According to theories of embodied cognition, language comprehenders simulate sensorimotor experiences to represent the meaning of what they read. Previous studies have shown that picture recognition is better if the object in the picture matches the orientation or shape implied by a preceding sentence. In order to test whether strategic imagery may explain previous findings, language comprehenders first read a list of sentences in which objects were mentioned. Only once the complete list had been read was recognition memory tested with pictures. Recognition performance was better if the orientation or shape of the object matched that implied by the sentence, both immediately after reading the complete list of sentences and after a 45-min delay. These results suggest that previously found match effects were not due to strategic imagery and show that details of sensorimotor simulations are retained over longer periods.     

The effects of thematic context and presentation mode on memory for sentence voice

A sentence in discourse may appear in the passive voice to emphasize the logical object rather than the logical subject when it is thematically more important. Two experiments are reported that explore the impact of this textual function of voice on sentence memory. The first experiment required subjects to listen to prose passages and then recall them. Sentences were recalled predominantly in the active voice regardless of voice or thematic focus in the prose passage, showing that the English-language bias for the active voice was a more important determinant of sentence reconstruction than was the experimental manipulation of thematic context. The second experiment required subjects to listen to or read either prose passages or lists of unrelated sentences and then to try to recognize key sentences that were either unchanged or changed lexically, semantically, or in voice. Recognition, both overall and specifically for voice, was better for sentences that were read than for those that were heard, and recognition for semantic change was consistently higher than for any other. Only when passages were read was there evidence in support of a thematic textual influence on memory for sentence voice.This research was supported in part by NIMH Grant 32063.     

On-line processing of topic structure by children and adults

A recent model of text processing proposed that adults construct a representation of topics during reading; a new topic is related to the representation as soon as relevant information is encountered. The present experiment tested the generality of this model for younger readers. Fourth- and sixth-grade children and college students read two hierarchically organized expository texts while reading times were recorded for initial topic sentences and specific nontopic sentences. Across ages, the major findings were (1) topic sentence reading times were shorter if a transition question informed the reader of the next topic; (2) topic sentence reading times were shorter if the new topic was directly related to the immediately preceding topic than if it was not directly related. Reading times for nontopic sentences were not affected by these manipulations. Reading times decreased as age increased, but text structure manipulations had very similar effects at all ages. The results are consistent with the general model, indicating that even young readers identify and relate expository text topics as they read.     

Contextually relevant aspects of meaning

A series of six experiments investigated whether inferences about contextually relevant aspects of meaning were encoded into memory during reading. In all the experiments, subjects studied short paragraphs. Then, test sentences were presented that expressed relevant aspects of meaning that had not been explicitly stated in the paragraphs. For example, for a paragraph about searching for the correct color to paint a picture of a tomato, a relevant aspect of meaning would be that tomatoes are red. The test sentences were presented either immediately following the relevant paragraph or after a delay. With immediate testing, it was argued that the facilitation obtained in verification latency could result from processes occurring either when the context was read or when the test sentence was verified. With delayed testing, evidence was found to support the hypothesis that contextually relevant aspects of meaning are incorporated into the memory representation of the paragraph, but such evidence was obtained only when the retrieval environment encouraged the use of newly learned information in the decision process on the test sentence.     

Thematic processing of adjuncts: Evidence from an eye-tracking experiment

We investigated thematic processing in sentences containing a prepositional phrase that was ambiguous between a locative and a temporal interpretation. We manipulated context (temporal or locative), target sentence (temporal or locative), and whether or not the main verb of the target and the context was repeated. Results showed that context dictated the participants' thematic expectations. Thematically, congruent target and context pairs were read faster than incongruent pairs. This effect was not modulated by verb repetition. We argue that wh-words cause readers to lodge semantically vacuous thematic roles in their discourse representation that bias a reader's interpretation of subsequent thematically ambiguous adjuncts in their discourse representation.     

Memory for word location during reading: Eye movements to previously read words are spatially selective but not precise

In two experiments, readers' use of spatial memory was examined by asking them to determine whether an individually shown probe word had appeared in a previously read sentence (Experiment 1) or had occupied a right or left sentence location (Experiment 2). Under these conditions, eye movements during the classification task were generally directed toward the right, irrespective of the location of the relevant target in the previously read sentence. In two additional experiments, readers' knowledge of prior sentence content was examined either without (Experiment 3) or with (Experiment 4) an explicit instruction to move the eyes to a target word in that sentence. Although regressions into the prior sentence were generally directed toward the target, they rarely reached it. In the absence of accurate spatial memories, readers reached previously read target words in two distinct steps--one that moved the eyes in the general vicinity of the target, and one that homed in on it.     

故事阅读中句子加工时间与理解的研究

被试是３０名大学生,实验材料为两个双情节故事。实验采用计算机按键计时的方式进行,每个故事一句一句地呈现在计算机屏幕上,每读完一句就按一下空格键,读完一个故事就马上回忆。实验结果表明：阅读时间呈现出一种递减模式,回忆量呈现出一种波浪模式,而且回忆量不受阅读时间的影响。     

Active memory processes in visual sentence comprehension: Clause effects and pronominal reference

Two experiments were conducted to investigate active memory processes during reading. Subjects read two-clause sentences one word at a time at a self-paced rate. Following each sentence a probe word was presented; subjects were to decide if this word occurred in the sentence they had just read. The first experiment examined clausal effects during reading. Reaction times to items from the final clause were shorter than those to items from a previous clause even when the same number of words intervened. The second experiment used the clause effect to address the issue of proniminal reference. Results indicated that a pronoun in the final clause activated the meaning of its antecedent, thus demonstrating that the method is sensitive to both surface and meaning codes in active memory.     

中文阅读中的边界效应及其消除：事件持续效应

运用动窗技术探讨中文阅读中的边界效应及其消除的条件,包括3个实验。实验一探讨中文阅读中是否存在边界效应,结果发现,边界效应同样存在于中文阅读中;实验二、三探讨时间切分标记能否消除边界效应以及消除的条件,结果发现,只有当切分标记表示的时间在前一事件持续的时间跨度外时才能消除边界效应,如果切分标记表示的时间仍在前一事件持续的时间跨度内,则不能消除边界效应,本研究称此为事件持续效应。从本研究结果中可以得出,时间切分标记降低了主题转换句子所需要的认知加工能量     

It Took Me by Surprise: Examining the Retroactive Enhancement Effect for Memory of Naturally Unfolding Events

In two experiments, we examined how accurately participants remembered details from a naturalistic, first-person perspective film, which ended with the protagonist either encountering or not encountering an unexpected detail. Participants who watched the film with the unexpected detail at the end displayed superior accuracy for preceding event details compared to those who watched a film without such a detail. This retroactive enhancement effect generalized across both visual and auditory details, but it appeared contingent upon the unexpected detail being relevant to the event’s story. The effect occurred whether participants’ memory was tested immediately or after a two-day delay. The present findings can be seen as consistent with prior work on synaptic tagging and long-term potentiation, but the phenomenon of retroactive enhancement has not been demonstrated previously for naturally unfolding events. Implications of the findings are discussed in relation to eyewitness memory and intrusive memories in post-traumatic stress disorder.     

Explaining the persistence of false memories: a proposal based on associative activation and thematic extraction

This study aimed to analyse the effect of retention intervals on associative and thematic false memories. Two experiments, using two types of critical items that were either associatively or thematically related to studied material, were conducted. In both experiments, one group of participants performed a recognition test immediately after the presentation of lists, and another group performed the task one week later. In Experiment 1, the recognition test consisted of pairs of items with four response alternatives (both items had been presented, only the left item had been presented, only the right item had been presented or none of the items had been presented). Critical items were also manipulated so that they were either presented in or absent from the list. In Experiment 2, a standard recognition test that differed in the mode of presentation was used: self-paced or speeded response. Both experiments showed that associative critical items were more recognised than thematic critical items in the immediate condition. However, whereas associative critical items decayed after a one-week delay, thematic critical items were similarly recognised at both retention intervals. The findings of the present study suggest that each type of process – associative and thematic – behave differently over time.     

How Stories in Memory Perpetuate the Continued Influence of False Information

People often encounter information that they subsequently learn is false. Past research has shown that people sometimes continue to use this misinformation in their reasoning, even if they remember that the information is false, which researchers refer to as the continued influence effect. The current work shows that the continued influence effect depends on the stories people have in memory: corrected misinformation was found to have a stronger effect on people's beliefs than information that was topically related to the story if it helped to provide a causal explanation of a story they had read previously. We argue this effect occurs because information that can fill a causal “gap” in a story enhances comprehension of the story event, which allows people to build a complete (if inaccurate) event model that they prefer over an accurate but incomplete event model. This effect is less likely to occur for stories in memory that end in a negative way, presumably because people are more motivated to accurately understand negative outcome events.     

Witnessing postevents does not change memory traces,but can affect their retrieval

The results of three experiments suggest that a memory trace for an event is not altered by witnessing similar events, but that postevents can interfere with its retrieval. On an immediate recall test, details from an original story (e.g. wrench) were recalled less often if a subsequent story mentioned a ‘screwdriver’ than if it did not. The interference effect occurred if people were asked to recall details fromboth stories (tool —— ——), but not if people were asked to recall primarily from the first story. Thus, the interference effect in immediate recall was averted if the target trace could be activated selectively (Experiments 1a and 1b). A more general interference effect was found after a day. Fewer targets from the original story were recalled if the second story was presented just before the test than if both stories occurred a day earlier. Thus, the second story interfered with recall only if it emphasized contextual retrieval cues that did not match the trace for the targets (Experiment 2). Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Semantic binding,not attentional control,generates coherent global structure in children's narrative memory

Encoding and retrieving global narrative structure influences children's narrative recall. The influence of age and attentional/executive resources on binding processes during sentence list recall was examined in 5- to 6- and 8- to 9-year-old children. Older and younger children showed superior recall of lists, and achieved higher scores on two metrics of chunking; access to different sentences (i.e., number of chunks) and sentence completion (i.e., chunk size), when lists were presented within a coherent global structure. Children's list recall and sentence access, but not their sentence completion scores, were affected by a concurrent self-paced attention-demanding task. Children, unlike adults, engage in active storage of verbal information in thematically related sentence lists. The coherence-advantage effect was stable across age groups and insensitive to the secondary task. Overall, findings imply that semantic binding generates stronger memory representations and superior recall for sentences within a story context than for sentence sets that lack global narrative structure.     

Children's Inferences of Causal Events During Story Understanding

Second-grade children's inference of causal events was studied. Each of the 24 children heard 2 stories containing 6 event episodes. Each story was followed by either a sentence recognition or a cued-recall test. Event episodes explicitly stated an event followed by its outcome. Enablement episodes explicitly stated an action that was causally antecedent to the event, followed by the outcome of the event. Filler (control) episodes explicitly stated an action causally unrelated to the event, followed by the outcome of the event. The results indicate that the children more frequently inferred events from enablements than they inferred enablements from events, and that the children did not make the inferences at the time of reading, but instead made them when queried at the time of the test. This conclusion is suggested because there was false recognition of events but no false recall.     

The effect of discourse structure on depth of semantic integration in reading

A coherent discourse exhibits certain structures in that subunits of discourses are related to one another in various ways and in that subunits that contribute to the same discourse purpose are joined to create a larger unit so as to produce an effect on the reader. To date, this crucial aspect of discourse has been largely neglected in the psycholinguistic literature. In two experiments, we examined whether semantic integration in discourse context was influenced by the difference of discourse structure. Readers read discourses in which the last sentence was locally congruent but either semantically congruent or incongruent when interpreted with the preceding sentence. Furthermore, the last sentence was either in the same discourse unit or not in the same discourse unit as the preceding sentence, depending on whether they shared the same discourse purpose. Results from self-paced reading (Experiment 1) and eye tracking (Experiment 2) showed that discourse-incongruous words were read longer than discourse-congruous words only when the critical sentence and the preceding sentence were in the same discourse unit, but not when they belonged to different discourse units. These results establish discourse structure as a new factor in semantic integration and suggest that discourse effects depend both on the content of what is being said and on the way that the contents are organized.     

Processing complexity and sentence memory: evidence from amnesia.

This study examines sentence memory as a function of linguistic processing complexity in amnesic patients. Sentence length as well as lexical and syntactic complexity were manipulated in two sentence repetition experiments. It was found that the amnesic patients performed considerably worse than the control subjects and that performance decreased: (1) when sentence length was increased by the addition of adjuncts compared to arguments of the verb; (2) when the verb selected more thematic frames; and (3) when sentences involved "empty" argument positions that must be linked to antecedents, particularly across clausal boundaries. These data showed how linguistic complexity affects sentence memory and implied that the amnesic deficit did not involve a generalized difficulty for materials of similar length, rather, the deficit was specific to certain representational types and processing routines.     

Different mechanisms for role relations versus verb–action congruence effects: Evidence from ERPs in picture–sentence verification

Extant accounts of visually situated language processing do make general predictions about visual context effects on incremental sentence comprehension; these, however, are not sufficiently detailed to accommodate potentially different visual context effects (such as a scene–sentence mismatch based on actions versus thematic role relations, e.g., (Altmann & Kamide, 2007; Knoeferle & Crocker, 2007; Taylor & Zwaan, 2008; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998)). To provide additional data for theory testing and development, we collected event-related brain potentials (ERPs) as participants read a subject–verb–object sentence (500 ms SOA in Experiment 1 and 300 ms SOA in Experiment 2), and post-sentence verification times indicating whether or not the verb and/or the thematic role relations matched a preceding picture (depicting two participants engaged in an action). Though incrementally processed, these two types of mismatch yielded different ERP effects. Role–relation mismatch effects emerged at the subject noun as anterior negativities to the mismatching noun, preceding action mismatch effects manifest as centro-parietal N400s greater to the mismatching verb, regardless of SOAs. These two types of mismatch manipulations also yielded different effects post-verbally, correlated differently with a participant's mean accuracy, verbal working memory and visual-spatial scores, and differed in their interactions with SOA. Taken together these results clearly implicate more than a single mismatch mechanism for extant accounts of picture–sentence processing to accommodate.     

Verbal Integration: The Interaction of Participant Roles and Sentential Argument Structure

This paper explores the interaction between sentence level syntactic information and the semantic information that is carried with the verb during sentence comprehension. A cross-modal integration task was employed to examine whether the number of participant roles (thematic roles associated with the central meaning of the verb) causes an increase in processing load during integration of the verb into on-going sentence comprehension. The effect of preceding sentential structural information (varied with respect to the number of argument and/or adjunct NPs preceding the verb) was also manipulated. Independent of the structural information preceding the verb, verbs with two partici-pant roles were integrated into the sentence faster than verbs with three participant roles. This finding suggests that participant roles are stored with the representation of the verb and made immediately available during integration and comprehension. In addition, the syntactic distinction between arguments and adjuncts is also shown to play an immediate role in parsing and integration of language on-line.