Linguistic phenomena (e.g., words and syntactic structure) co-occur with a wide variety of meanings. These systematic correlations can help readers to interpret a text and create predictions about upcoming material. However, to what extent these correlations influence discourse processing is still unknown. We address this question by examining…

There is extensive evidence that people are sensitive to the statistical patterns of linguistic elements at the phonological, lexical, and syntactic levels. However, much less is known about how people classify referential events and whether they adapt to the most frequent types of references. Reference is particularly complex because referential…

Purpose: This study aimed to develop and test a measure of real-time continuous speech understanding to be used with natural dialogues. Method: The measure was based on a category monitoring paradigm and employed five existing recordings of natural dialogues from which the different test categories and associated target words were derived. For…

According to one view of linguistic information (Karttunen, 1974; Stalnaker, 1974), a speaker can convey contextually new information in one of two ways: (a) by "asserting" the content as new information; or (b) by "presupposing" the content as given information which would then have to be "accommodated." This…

Irony comprehension in seven- and eight-year-old children with typically developing language skills was explored under the framework of the graded salience hypothesis. Target ironic remarks, either conventional or novel/situation-specific, were presented following brief story contexts. Children's responses to comprehension questions were used to…

This study concerns the mechanisms involving temporal update in discourse comprehension, comparing traditional approaches based on "Aktionsart" and Iconicity against an approach based on narrative expectations. Our experiments suggest that readers pay more attention to fine-grained discourse properties (such as salient temporal…

When learning their first language, children develop strategies for assigning semantic roles to sentence structures, depending on morphosyntactic cues such as case and word order. Traditionally, comprehension experiments have presented transitive clauses in isolation, and cross-linguistically children have been found to misinterpret object-first…

In this article I posit translation as philosophical operation that disrupts commonsense meaning and understanding. By defamiliarising language, translation can arrest thinking about a text in a way that assumes the language is understood. In recent work I have grappled with the phrase "ways of knowing", which, for linguistic and conceptual…

This study investigated the effects of an instructional procedure which incorporated lexical cohesion and macrorules to promote main idea comprehension of Thai EFL students. One hundred and six undergraduate students taking a reading module were randomly assigned to one of three teaching conditions: the combined use of lexical cohesion and…

The distinction between literal meaning, the domain of semantics, and inferred or implicated meaning, the domain of pragmatics, is examined. Grice's (1975) theory of implicated or conveyed meaning as part of an overall account of cooperative communicative behavior is evaluated. A range of data is presented which challenges Grice's theory.…

A network model of logical and semantic structures from which speakers or writers generate linguistic messages at the discourse level is presented. (Author)

Four experiments demonstrated that the comprehension of novel compound nouns involves the recognition of a general relationship between two categories. They reinforce earlier findings that the process of creating meanings may be equally as efficient as the process of selecting meanings. (33 references) (Author/LB)

Extralexical information, that is, those semantic properties evoked by words which are not usually accommodated in lexicons of any kind, is essential for the comprehension of numerous ordinary sentences in a natural language. A brief review of studies on forms of extralexical information shows that those works do not deal with: (1) questions of…

This research studied the processes which enable people to acquire semantic information from natural-language discourse. Specific objectives were: (1) to represent semantically the structural meaning of English discourse by a well-defined semantic model; (2) to develop a way of using the semantic representation of a text as a structural model for…

Research findings on semantic cohesion within a sentence and its effect on individuals' performance in using the sentences illustrate how research methodology can influence research outcomes. (MSE)