Raises the question of when extraordinary measures are justified in interpreting a discourse. Questions whether the same decoding strategies should be used to derive meaning from a schizophrenic's discourse as from that of a nonschizophrenic. (FL)

Notes that the empirical research in language psychology can be helpful in reorganizing the domain of literary studies. Presents a survey of the major considerations in regard to such an undertaking and provides a specific demonstration. (FL)

Explores alternative actions which can be produced by practices of talking associated with the action of "initiating repair": questioning terms and certain forms of repeats. Shows that initiating repair can be produced by a practice which does not ordinarily produce it. Argues that situated analysis must go hand-in-hand with more formal…

Contributes to communication theory and research by adding to a discussion of a computational model called latent semantic analysis (LSA). Argues that LSA does not handle all aspects of language processing, but offers a biologically and psychologically plausible mechanistic explanation of the acquisition, induction, and representation of verbal…

Surveys the long-standing, diversified tradition of European research on text and discourse and cites the main sources and overview works in the field. (FL)

Defines quantitative-discourse psychology. Illustrates its practice in five research projects, all of which examined naturalistic discourse, investigating: reading time; inference generation; construction of multiple agents (narrators, characters) in literary short stories; tutorial dialog; and dialog patterns in two-party conversations. Notes a…

Discusses the differences among current researchers interested in inferences, including the types of inferences studied and the methodologies used. Presents a theoretical and methodological framework for organizing empirical investigations of inferential processes of reading. (HB)

Argues for the usefulness of merging experimental and correlational approaches in the study of expository prose comprehension. Reviews studies in recent years. Shows that the correlational approach yields results similar to the experimental literature, and that the vast databanks associated with multiple-choice tests allow exploration of some of…

Analyzes four research reports to identify the similarities and differences in beliefs about the nature of discourse and how one acquires knowledge about it. Considers implications of these distinctive styles for cross-disciplinary communication about discourse. (SR)

Introduces this special issue which describes several approaches to semantic knowledge representations. Discusses the various quantitative procedures employed in the articles, noting that they can also serve as theoretical approaches to knowledge representation. (SR)

Describes a computational model of high-dimensional context space: the Hyperspace Analog to Language (HAL). Shows that HAL provides sufficient information to make semantic, grammatical, and abstract distinctions. Demonstrates the cognitive compatibility of the representations with human processing; and introduces a new methodology that extracts…

Offers an introduction to the theory and implementation of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a theory and method for extracting and representing the contextual-usage meaning of words by statistical computations applied to a large corpus of text. Gives an overview of applications and modeling of human knowledge to which LSA has been applied. (SR)

Demonstrates the value of quantitative analysis of discourse options by focusing on two discourse options for the representation of cause and effect. (HTH)

Introduces the Knowledge Digraph Contribution (KDC) data-analysis methodology for quantitatively measuring the degree to which a given knowledge digraph can account for the occurrence of specific sequences of propositions in recall, summarization, talk-aloud and question-answering protocol data. Notes the applicability of this approach to the…

Illustrates use of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) for predicting coherence through reanalyzing two studies that manipulated coherence of texts and assessed readers' comprehension. Finds that LSA predicts effects of text coherence on comprehension. Notes that LSA can be applied as an automated method that produces coherence predictions similar to…