Understanding Written and Pictured Information

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This research, a renewal of Potter's current NSF-supported research project, will study the very rapid processes involved in reading, comprehending, and remembering words, sentences, and pictures. The main focus of the work is on levels or stages of processing: What are the levels of processing, what is their time course, and how do they interact? I. In reading, is the first stage of word recognition (a) responsive only to the visual word itself, as modular theories hold, or (b) is it influenced by the previous sentence context, as "interactive" theories propose? The nonword illusion and letter migration are two phenomena that reflect early stages of word recognition; if they show an effect of sentence context, that will support (b). An extension to "nonobject" perception is planned. II. As a sentence is read, several levels of representation are presumably computed: a syntactic structure, the literal meaning of the word combination, and a broader interpretation of the meaning in the context of the text. These levels of sentence processing will be tracked as they evolve over time, by varying the rate of reading and by probing recognition of a word in the sentence at several intervals after presentation. III. Immediately after reading a sentence, "verbatim" recall is possible, even for long sentences that exceed the normal memory span of seven or so unrelated words. This shows that one's memory for a sentence is efficiently structured. The research will test the hypothesis that the structure is primarily meaning- based; recall, like spontaneous sentence production, starts from a set of ideas the speaker intends to express, and it relies on the verb to produce the appropriate sentence structure. The words used to express the ideas of the original sentence are selected from recently-activated words, resulting in high accuracy of recall under normal circumstances. Together, these studies will give a picture of several levels of processing during the reading, understanding, and recall of sentences, and will draw parallels to picture processing in certain cases. The research will increase understanding of the reading process and may help in the design of improved methods of reading instruction.