Cognitive mechanisms of language comprehension and memory for text

语言理解对于人类活动的大多数领域都至关重要，从交谈到欣赏小说再到解读技术手册。这项研究结合了人体实验和计算机模拟来检查允许成年人用母语理解信息并表示信息含义的心理过程。理解在很大程度上是推断性的——读到玻璃掉到混凝土上，人们通常会理解玻璃碎了。研究的一个重点是人们如何推断文本背后复杂的目标结构。一篇报纸文章可能会描述两个国家争夺一个海洋岛屿的权利，或者虚构的人物共同努力实现一个目标。充分的理解依赖于人们运用他们的知识来推断出参与者行动之间相互联系的目标结构。记住一条信息并回答有关它的问题是理解的基本标准。这项研究考察了人们记忆信息的策略，从试图回忆精确的细节到回忆大致的感觉。它还将这些策略与更自动的记忆影响区分开来。意义：本研究对加拿大乃至世界具有重要意义：区分青少年阅读理解能力强弱的因素是什么？老年人错过了普通信息的含义吗？广告的哪些特性会误导读者？对科学文本、小说和其他文本类型的理解是否存在差异？这项研究还涉及从错误记忆（文本推理经常被“错误”识别）到描述信息中描述的情况等基本科学问题。

Language comprehension is central to most realms of human activity, from conversation to enjoying a novel to deciphering a technical manual. This research combines human experimentation and computer simulation to inspect the mental processes that permit adults to understand messages in their first language and to represent message meaning.Comprehension is largely inferential -- having read that the glass fell to the concrete, people generally understand that the glass BROKE. One focus of the research is how people infer the complex goal structures that underlie text. A newspaper article might describe two states disputing their rights to an ocean island, or fictional characters jointly trying to achieve an objective. Full understanding depends on people's use of their knowledge to deduce the goal structure that interrelates the participants' actions.Remembering a message and answering questions about it are basic criteria of understanding. This research examines people's strategies for remembering messages, from trying to recall the precise details to recollecting the general sense. It also distinguishes these strategies from more automatic memory influences.SIGNIFICANCE: The research bears on issues important to Canada and beyond: What are the factors that distinguish teenagers strong and weak in reading comprehension? Do older adults miss the implications of ordinary messages? What properties of an advertisement contribute to it misleading a reader? Are there differences among the understanding of scientific text, fiction, and other text genres? The research also bears on fundamental scientific questions ranging from false memory (text inferences are often "falsely" recognized) to representing the situation described in a message.