Conventional implicatures are omnipresent in daily life communication but experimental research on this topic is sparse, especially research with children. The aim of this study was to investigate if eight- to twelve-year-old children spontaneously make the conventional implicature induced by "but," "so," and…

Research on emotion inferences has shown that readers include a representation of the main character's emotional state in their mental representations of the text. We examined the specificity of emotion representations as a function of the emotion content of short narratives, in terms of the quantity and quality of emotion components included in…

Recent advances in causal reasoning have given rise to a computational model that emulates the process by which humans generate, evaluate, and distinguish counterfactual sentences. Contrasted with the "possible worlds" account of counterfactuals, this "structural" model enjoys the advantages of representational economy,…

According to most theories of text comprehension, readers construct and store in memory at least two inter-related representations: a text base containing the explicit ideas in a text and a discourse model that contains the overall meaning or "gist" of a text. The authors propose a refinement of this view in which text representations are…

This study examined neural activity associated with establishing causal relationships across sentences during on-line comprehension. ERPs were measured while participants read and judged the relatedness of three-sentence scenarios in which the final sentence was highly causally related, intermediately related, and causally unrelated to its…

Background: This study investigates children's ability to generate inferences from narratives containing counterfactual information. Methods: 39 typically developing readers (mean age 10; 05) completed an on-line task in which they were asked to read short passages, followed by sentences which they had to judge as true or false. The sentences…

Two experiments investigated 4-year-olds' use of descriptive sentences to learn non-obvious properties of unfamiliar kinds. Novel creatures were described using generic or nongeneric sentences (e.g., "These are pagons. Pagons/These pagons are friendly"). Children's willingness to extend the described property to a new category member was then…

The intersection of Theory of Mind (ToM) processing and complex narrative comprehension in high functioning autism was examined by comparing cortical activation during the reading of passages that required inferences based on either intentions, emotional states, or physical causality. Right hemisphere activation was substantially greater for all…

It has been a matter of debate whether the specifically human capacity to process syntactic information draws on attentional resources or is automatic. To address this issue, we recorded neurophysiological indicators of syntactic processing to spoken sentences while subjects were distracted to different degrees from language processing. Subjects…

This paper provides an explanation for the nonspecificity of emotion inferences found in previous research [e.g., Language and Cognitive Processes, 19(5), 613-638, 2004]. We first demonstrate that behavioral components of emotions, as opposed to emotions per se, are better markers of readers' mental representations of the main character's…

Participants acquired spatial knowledge of a fictitious island by studying either (a) a complete physical map, (b) a sequence of part maps each showing the outline of the island and a subset of the landmarks, or (c) a sequence of sentences each describing a part map. During test, they verified the direction between 2 landmarks. Spatial knowledge…