Examines answer selection within the framework of QUEST, a psychological model of question answering that specifies how knowledge structures are searched during question answering. Examines whether both "legal" and "illegal" answers were activated during the search. Finds support for QUEST's arc-search procedures associated…

Investigates conditions that enable viewers to predict future events while viewing a movie. Hypothesizes that predictions about future events can be supported by visual, auditory, and discursive information. Interprets data from two experiments in terms of pragmatic and causal factors in comprehension. (PA)

Proposes an alternative model of language comprehension regarding how people understand idioms in which literal meanings are systematically used to constrain the use and variation of conventional idioms and to generate novel idiom variance. Presents three experiments on how people process variant idioms. (SR)

Discusses three experiments conducted to determine whether inferences that function so as to preserve the coherence of a passage are drawn in the course of comprehension. (Author/FL)

Offers a brief overview of the Structure Building Framework, a simple framework for describing the cognitive processes and mechanisms involved in discourse comprehension. Reviews the seminal work on which it is based (the first decade of structure-building research); and recounts the research conducted by the author to test the Structure Building…

Uses an analysis of children's interpretations of a complex episode of social interaction to illustrate three features that distinguish them from robot plans and that form a basis for a theory of the development of social action: human plans (1) are social, (2) operate on interpretations, and (3) are used, not just executed. (FL)

Examines the accuracy of quoted speech in newspapers, focusing on what people can remember verbatim and how that information relates to language processing, comprehension, and the mental representation of prose. Finds that memory for meaning was better than memory for verbatim prose, though memory for both was high. (MM)

Provides evidence for the utility of schema-based frameworks which assume that schemas and scripts organize information, aid in comprehension, and guide information retrieval. (FL)