Understanding the glue of narrative structure: Children's on- and off-line inferences about characters’ goals

Because characters’ goals play a key role in the structure of narratives, the ability to make inferences about goals is essential to narrative comprehension. Despite their importance, no previous studies have examined the process by which children make these goal inferences. In the current study, we examined 6- and 8-year-old children's goal inference making processes through think-aloud protocols. We also examined the product of comprehension, the mental representation of text, through free recall and comprehension questions. The results revealed that children of both ages regularly made appropriate goal inferences while listening to narratives. In addition, the number of goal inferences predicted children's recall of the stories. Thus, children as young as 6 years old are sensitive to the vital role of characters’ goals in narrative structure, and they can engage in sophisticated cognitive processing while they listen to narratives to form coherent mental representations of them.     

The sound of motion in spoken language: visual information conveyed by acoustic properties of speech

Language is generally viewed as conveying information through symbols whose form is arbitrarily related to their meaning. This arbitrary relation is often assumed to also characterize the mental representations underlying language comprehension. We explore the idea that visuo-spatial information can be analogically conveyed through acoustic properties of speech and that such information is integrated into an analog perceptual representation as a natural part of comprehension. Listeners heard sentences describing objects, spoken at varying speaking rates. After each sentence, participants saw a picture of an object and judged whether it had been mentioned in the sentence. Participants were faster to recognize the object when motion implied by speaking rate matched the motion implied by the picture. Results suggest that visuo-spatial referential information can be analogically conveyed and represented.     

语音记忆和中央执行功能在不同年级儿童解码和语言理解中的作用

选取256名三～六年级儿童,采用相关分析、结构方程模型等方法考察了语音记忆和中央执行功能在不同年级儿童的解码和语言理解中的作用。结果显示,在低年级阶段,语音记忆和刷新对解码存在显著预测作用,转换和刷新对语言理解存在显著预测作用;在高年级阶段,只有刷新对解码保持着稳定的预测作用。这表明,语音记忆和中央执行功能对儿童的解码和语言理解存在不同的影响,并且这种影响会随着年级的增长发生变化。     

中小学生语文阅读理解能力结构及其发展特点研究

本文从实证的角度探讨了中小学生语文阅读理解能力的结构组成及其发展特点。结果认为,被试阅读理解能力的水平主要是受其阅读理解能力结构的发展水平制约,因为即使在同一个年级组里。高水平被试组的阅读理解能力结构也比低水平被试组的阅读理解能力结构更复杂。而阅读理解能力水平的发展一般遵循量的累加与质的飞跃的过程,质的飞跃意味着阅读理解能力结构的发展与分化。     

动词隐含因果性对代词加工的影响

本研究探讨了在汉语句子理解中动词隐含因果性对代词指认的影响。在实验一巾,被试进行自定步速的阅读．结果发现当动词隐含因果性和句中代词实际所指一致时阅读时间较短,不一致时阅读时间较长。实验二采用眼动技术,句中两个参与者性别不同,代词上提供性别线索,结果显示了动词隐含因果性在代词加工上微弱的即时效应。     

弱智儿童对词汇理解的研究

以上海市88名学前—3年级的弱智儿童为对象,以PPVT—R为材料,研究弱智儿童对于名词、动词、形容词以及词组的理解情况。结果发现：弱智儿童的智力水平与词汇理解能力有显著的相关;弱智儿童的年级水平与词汇理解能力有十分显著的相关,教育对于弱智儿童的词汇理解能力的发展有重要作用。     

Sensitive Caregiving Fosters the Comprehension of Speech: When Gestures Speak Louder than Words

Despite a variety of theoretical arguments to the contrary, sensitive caregiving makes an important contribution to the comprehension and emergence of speech. This research, informed by social ecological realism, documented that during the prelinguistic and one-word periods, caregivers routinely provided additional perceptual structure to their infants following communicative breakdowns. This sensitive adjusting of subsequent messages to infants contributed significantly to reaching a common understanding. Caregivers also modified their verbal messages in subsequent turns by making them more specific. In contrast, however, these elaborations did not contribute to achieving a practical consensus regarding ongoing events. These results suggest that the social ecological realist approach informing this research has important implications for theory, reviewing past empirical findings and future research. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Is Complex Visual Information Implicated During Language Comprehension? The Case of Cast Shadows

Previous research showed that sensorimotor information affects the perception of properties associated with implied perceptual context during language comprehension. Three experiments addressed a novel question of whether perceptual context may contribute to a simulation of information about such out-of-sight objects as cast shadows. In Experiment 1, participants read a sentence that implied a particular shadow cast on a target (blinds vs. an open window) and then verified the picture of the object onto which a shadow was cast. Responses were faster when the shadow of blinds cast on the object matched that implied by the sentence. However, the data did not show the same matching effect for pictures with cast shadows from an open window. In Experiments 2 and 3, we found that verification times for pictures with no cast shadows were faster when preceded by an “open window” sentence, thus suggesting that reading the sentence does not elicit a visual simulation of any specific shadow. Experiment 3 showed that the objects superimposed with a cast shadow of the blinds and blinds themselves were verified faster after reading a “blinds” sentence. However, the results of an order analysis showed the temporal stability of the “blinds shadows” effect, but the disappearance of the “blinds” effect in the second half of the data. We conclude that the results are compatible, to a lesser or greater extent, with multiple accounts, and discuss our findings in the context of a mental imagery view, a mental simulation view, and an amodal representation view.     

Context and Complexity in Incremental Sentence Interpretation: An ERP Study on Temporal Quantification

The present event-related potential (ERP) study used picture–sentence verification to investigate the neurolinguistic correlates of the online processing of compositional-semantic information. To this end, we examined context effects on sentences involving temporal adverbial quantification likeJana war jeden Morgen schwimmen an den Arbeitstagen (“Jana went for a swim every morning during the working week”). We tested whether the conceptual complexity associated with quantifying over time intervals leads to delayed predictions regarding the upcoming words in a sentence. The present study replicated previous results relating to quantification over individuals, which are conceptually less complex than time intervals. Analogous to previous studies, false vs. true sentences elicited an N400 whenever contextual cues did not permit a potential revision of a locally assigned truth value. The present results are compatible with an approach under which contextual cues are immediately considered for predicting how a sentence continues. The fact that the contextual complexity did not lead to processing delays indicates that the processing system quickly abstracts away from the conceptual complexity associated with the linguistic input if such an abstraction is possible.