LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION AS STRUCTURE BUILDING

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Many processes and mechanisms involved in language comprehension are general cognitive processes and mechanisms. The Structure Building Framework identifies a few of those cognitive processes and mechanisms. According to the Structure Building Framework, the goal of comprehension is to build coherent mental representations or structures. Three component processes are involved. First, comprehenders lay foundations for their mental structures. Next, comprehenders develop mental structures by mapping on new information when that information coheres or relates to previous information. However, when the incoming information is less related, comprehenders employ a different process: They shift and attach a new substructure. Thus, most representations comprise several branching substructures. The building blocks of mental structures are memory nodes, which are activated by incoming stimuli. Initial activation forms the foundation of mental structures. Once a foundation is laid, subsequent information is often mapped on because the more coherent the incoming information is with the previous information, the more likely it is to activate the same or connected memory nodes. The less coherent the incoming information is, the less likely it is to activate the same memory nodes. In this case, a different set of nodes is activated, and their activation forms the foundation for a new substructure. In addition, once memory nodes are activated, two mechanisms control their level of activation: suppression and enhancement. Memory nodes are enhanced when the information they represent is necessary for further structure building; they are suppressed when the information they represent is no longer as necessary. The three processes involved in structure building (laying a foundation, mapping, and shifting) and the two mechanisms that control these structure building processes (suppression and enhancement) underlie numerous comprehension phenomena. Moreover, differences in the efficiency of these processes and mechanisms underlie differences on adult comprehension skill. The proposed research provide critical tests of the Structure Building Framework. It answers the following questions: Do comprehenders lay foundations in languages other than English whose speakers do not rely so heavily on word order when comprehending sentences? Are there communication devices that facilitate mapping? When does shifting occur? Can shifting be empirically discriminated from foundation laying and mapping? How selective are the mechanisms of suppression and enhancement? Can suppression be discriminated from enhancement? To answer these questions, experiments will investigate cross-linguistic differences in comprehension, facilitation by structural parallelism, comprehension of idioms and implicit information, syntactic parsing, statistical models of reading time, and differences between less- versus more-skilled comprehenders. The answers to these questions will be relevant to members of populations who, because of neurological insults or neuropsychological disorders, have language comprehension disabilities.