A considerable body of research has examined the age-old assertion that reading literature enhances empathy, however, mixed results have been found. The present study attempts to clarify such disparities, investigating the role of foregrounding in possible differences in readers' processing of literary texts and its connection with readers'…

Text social information includes the cognitive processes and social communication skills that support real or hypothetical human thought or interaction. The current measure of text social information is genre. However, genre is a limited measure because of poor operationalization, limited specificity, and overlap with structural and linguistic…

Comprehension substantially benefits from attending to, thinking about, and mentally representing the sources of any presented information. Such processes require mental effort and unfortunately people do not always engage in such activities. The current article presents a nascent, evolving model of discourse comprehension that formalizes…

People overhearing referential communication understand more when they listen in on dialogues rather than monologues. Some have proposed this is because entrainment selects better referential expressions. In a corpus analysis, we considered the role of addressees in contributing to entrainment and measured the degree to which particular…

The existing literature presents conflicting models of how "this" and "that" access different segments of a written discourse, frequently relying on implicit analogies with spoken discourse. On the basis of this literature, we hypothesized that in written discourse, "this" more readily accesses the adjacent/right…

The present study examined the influence of a human or computer "partner" on the production of fillers ("um" and "uh") during a question and answer task. Experiment 1 investigated whether or not responding to a human partner as opposed to a computer partner results in a higher rate of filler production. Participants…

As part of a growing body of conversation analytic research on epistemics in social interaction, this study explores various uses of the Japanese sentence-final particle "kke", which conveys the speaker's claim that she or he has some degree of uncertainty in recalling something from the past. The study aims to demonstrate how "mental" concepts…

Because higher level cognitive processes generally involve the use of world knowledge, computational models of these processes require the implementation of a knowledge base. This article identifies and discusses 4 strategies for dealing with world knowledge in computational models: disregarding world knowledge, "ad hoc" selection, extraction from…

Speakers in conversation routinely engage in audience design. That is, they construct their utterances to be understood by particular addressees. Standard accounts of audience design have frequently appealed to the notion of common ground. On this view, speakers produce well-designed utterances by expressly considering the knowledge they take as…