COGNITIVE PROCESSES & MECHANISMS IN COMPREHENSION

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The candidate's research goal is to explore the nature of language processing with the long-term objective of painting an overall picture of this rather complex, cognitive skill. The candidate's language processing involve general cognitive processes controlled by general cognitive mechanisms. From this view, the candidate proposes three means for achieving her long-term goal. One is to continue developing a framework that she has developed called the Structure Building Framework. The Structure Building Framework identifies and describes a few of the general cognitive processes and mechanisms involved in language that the framework suggests. For example, does information presented in the initial position of a sentence or passage have a privileged position in a comprehender's representation? According to the Structure Building Framework it does, but according to other models of sentence and text processing and representation, such as proposition-based models, it doesn't. A second approach to the candidate's long-term goal involves exploring other complex cognitive skills that presumably draw on the same cognitive processes and mechanisms that language does. On is a first step toward understanding the analogy. This project investigates the acquisition of artificial linguistic languages and artificial musical "languages" that share their structural organization (i.e., syntax). A third approach to the candidate's long-term goal involves exploring the cognitive processes and mechanisms that are disrupted when language is disordered as in aphasia and some cases of schizophrenia. In this pursuit, the candidate is only at the training stage and not yet the research stage. Other components of the candidate's training gaining more knowledge of the structure of language so that she can further discriminate linguistic explanations from general, cognitive ones. In particular, she seeks to become one of the few psycholingustic s who can examine language comprehension cross-linguistically. She also seeks to gain more skill in formal modelling. In particular, connectionist modelling. The Structure Building Framework could be tested by implementing it as a connectionist modelling. The Structure Building Framework could be tested by implementing it as a connectionist system; surely that would complement the experimental tests that have been made of it and that the candidate plans to continue making. Finally, the candidate seeks more training in the area of music cognition so that she can better understand the cognitive and structural analogies between music and language.