The primary goal of research in reading comprehension is to specify the nature of the memory representation that readers create and the cognitive processes involved in building that representation. Although significant progress is being made in understanding the influence of a wide range of text and reader characteristics on comprehension, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the influence of the structural, or syntactic, characteristics of text. As Kintsch (1992) argued, """"""""syntactic questions play only a minor role in the current work on discourse processing, text comprehension, and conversation. Such an essential feature of language as grammar surely must be more important than we have given it credit for. This imbalance needs to be redressed."""""""" The proposed experiments are a first step toward remedying this imbalance. They address the hypothesis that structural factors, such as sentence endings, main versus subordinate clauses, """"""""wh"""""""" clauses and """"""""if' clefts, influence the effectiveness of text inputs as retrieval cues to memory. This prediction is motivated by the memory-based text processing models (McKoon, Gerrig and Greene, 1996) and promise to extend them in important way. According to both Kintsch's (1988) construction-integration model and Myers and O'Brien's (1998) resonance model, concepts and propositions from the current sentence serve as retrieval cues, automatically activating related information from earlier in the discourse. Whereas a number of semantic factors have been shown to affect the resonance process, the influence of syntactic factors has not been explored. Further, only minor modifications should be needed to modify these models to incorporate the effect of syntactic factors. Finally, the proposed experiments use eye movements as the primary measure of cognitive processing. Although eye movements have been used extensively and successfully used to study word and sentence processing, their use with more complex stimuli, such as narratives, has been much more limited. Thus, proposed experiments promise to 1) shed light on the influence of structural factors on comprehension, 2) extend the memory-based text processing models and 3) expand the use of eye movements data to the study of narratives.
| Weingartner, Kristin M; Klin, Celia M (2005) Perspective taking during reading: an on-line investigation of the illusory transparency of intention. Mem Cognit 33:48-58 |
| Klin, Celia M; Weingartner, Kristin M; Guzman, Alexandria E et al. (2004) Readers' sensitivity to linguistic cues in narratives: how salience influences anaphor resolution. Mem Cognit 32:511-22 |
