Language and Memory in the Processing of Reference

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This project will examine the cognitive processes that are engaged by the probe-word tasks that have commonly been used to study language comprehension, focusing on the processes involved in the comprehension of referring expressions during the reading of narrative texts. It will do so in order to determine the extent to which the memory processes measured by probe tasks are those that are usually involved in language comprehension and the extent to which they arise from strategic task adaptations. The project seeks to gain an understanding of the mechanisms by which referential expressions are interpreted and by which patterns of coreferential expressions contribute to the meaning and coherence of sentences within a discourse Empirical work will use probe word recognition tasks. These tasks involve presenting subjects with a probe word and asking them to make a speeded response indicating whether or not that word has occurred in the passage that they are reading (or hearing). Use of the task is based on the assumption that response times to the probe word reflect the accessibility of discourse referents in the memory representations that are being constructed as part of language comprehension. The research using the task aims to test the validity of that assumption in specific types of studies on coreference. The probe word recognition tasks will use rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) with the sentence or passage being presented at the center of a computer screen The exploration of the probe word task will focus on two major issues: How do the mechanisms for coreferential interpretation of reduced expressions (specifically pronouns) and complete referring expressions (specifically proper names) differ and what is the relative ease of interpreting these two forms of expressions in a coreferential manner? Probe word recognition experiments will examine the extent to which results showing that repeated name coreference increases memory accessibility more than pronominal coreference may be due to strategic adaptations to the probe word recognition task. How do the sequential and syntactic structure of language influence mental representation in a model of discourse and how does this mental representation influence the interpretation of referring expressions in linguistic input? Probe-word recognition experiments will examine the extent to which evidence on the importance of sequential organization (particularly first mention) on memory accessibility are due to strategic task adaptations.