Reading: Interactions with Memory.

Abstract

The research proposed that the representation of linguistic and contextual information be kept in working memory during reading or listening can be described as a discourse model, representing the concepts referenced in the discourse and the relations among them. The concepts in the model are hypothesized to vary in their accessibility, where accessibility is determined by the syntactic and pragmatic contexts in which the concept are introduced. Subsequent reference to a concept is a function of the interaction of the expression used to reference the concept and the concept itself. The experiments in this report demonstrate support for the discourse model view by showing that difficulty of comprehension for pronouns and the degree to which they are fully understood depends on syntactic and pragmatic variables that affect the accessibility of the pronouns' intended referents.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jul 23, 1991
Accession Number
ADA239219

Entities

People

  • Gail Mckoon

Organizations

  • Northwestern University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Cognition
  • Cognitive Science
  • Comprehension
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Eye Movements
  • Identification
  • Information Processing
  • Language
  • Linguistics
  • Materials
  • Model Theory
  • New York
  • Psychology
  • Recognition
  • Universities

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics
  • Theoretical Analysis.