The primary aim of this research is to lay the groundwork for an analysis of discourse comprehension as comprising a variety of processes that lie along a spectrum from purely automatic to purely strategic. Automatic processes are fast and mandatory, and they support more complex, strategic inferences. This research investigates comprehenders' processing of several types of refer-ring expressions. The proposed experiments use on-line or delayed recognition tests, which ask subjects to verify words or pairs of words as having been in a narrative they read. The assumption throughout is that processing of a referring expression should facilitate subsequent responses to the antecedent of that expression.. Recent research has suggested that a variety of different constraints on processing may lead to different comprehension strategies. The first experiment proposed examines whether different groups of subjects may strategically engage in different comprehension processes. This experiment varies the frequency with which two different components of comprehension are tested, thereby varying subjects' expectations about what they are likely to be tested on, possibly leading them to adopt different comprehension strategies. The second set of experiments tests the limits of one automatic process, resolution of noun anaphors. Evidence to date suggests that this process is automatic, but it remains an open question whether a semantic relationship between an anaphor and its antecedent is necessary to facilitate this process. To answer this question, these experiments investigate resolution of nominal anaphors that are not semantically related to their antecedents. The third line of experiments looks at what happens in the comprehension process when a situation that is routinely handled by an automatic process is superseded by a strategic process. Readers draw upon different types of knowledge during discourse comprehension. For example, the narrator and the protagonist of a text might have different information available to them. The final experiments investigate the time course over which these different sources of information become available to a comprehender. Insight into the processes of comprehension has implications for understanding and possibly remediating various language deficits. Automatic and strategic processes might be differentially implicated in these deficits, suggesting different approaches to remediation.
| McKoon, G; Gerrig, R J; Greene, S B (1996) Pronoun resolution without pronouns: some consequences of memory-based text processing. J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 22:919-32 |
