Corpus evidence suggests that in contexts in which the presence of multiple antecedents might favor plural reference, the disadvantage observed for singular reference may disappear if the potential antecedents are combined in a group-like plural entity. We examined the relative salience of antecedents in conditions where the context either made a…

Understanding visual narratives requires readers to track dimensions of time, spatial location, and characters across a sequence. Previous work has found situational changes across adjacent panels differ cross-culturally, but few works have examined such situational dimensions across extended sequences. We therefore investigated situational…

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…

We often use pronouns like it or they without explicitly mentioned antecedents. We asked whether the human processing system that resolves such indirect pronouns uses the immediate visual-sensory context in multimodal discourse. Our results showed that people had no difficulty understanding conceptually central referents, whether explicitly…

Different words generally have different meanings. However, some words seemingly share similar meanings. An example are null and overt pronouns in Italian, which both refer to an individual in the discourse. Is the interpretation and processing of a form affected by the existence of another form with a similar meaning? With a pupillary response…

Several theoretical proposals tried to account for the meaning open-endedness of metaphors in literature and for the effortful process they trigger in readers. However, very few experiments have tackled the neurophysiological underpinnings of literary metaphor. Here we used Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs) to explore the temporal dynamics of…

In discourse processing, speakers collaborate toward a shared mental model by establishing and recruiting prominence relations between different discourse referents. In this article we investigate to what extent the possibility to infer a referent's existence from preceding context (as indicated by the referent's information status as inferred or…

This study investigates the influence of causal and concessive relations on discourse coherence in Chinese by means of eye movement and self-paced reading techniques. We use the sentential structure like "NP[subscript HUMAN] moved from place A to place B, {because ([Chinese characters omitted] yinwei) /although ([Chinese characters omitted]…

Whether information is routinely and nonstrategically evaluated for truth during comprehension is still a point of contention. Previous studies supporting the assumption of nonstrategic validation have used a Stroop-like paradigm in which participants provided yes/no judgments in tasks unrelated to the truth or plausibility of the experimental…

Communicating via text-only computer-mediated communication (CMC) channels is associated with a number of issues that would impair users in achieving dialogue coherence and goals. It has been suggested that humans have devised novel adaptive strategies to deal with those issues. However, it could be that humans rely on "classic"…

The issue addressed in this study is whether propositional integration and world-knowledge inference can be distinguished as separate processes during the comprehension of Dutch "omdat" (because) sentences. "Propositional integration" refers to the process by which the reader establishes the type of relation between two clauses…

We explored the possibility of using automatic techniques to analyze the use of backward causal connectives in large Dutch newspaper corpora. With the help of 2 techniques, Latent Semantic Analysis and Thematic Text Analysis, the contexts of more than 14,000 connectives were studied. The method of analysis is described. We found that differences…

Research on cognitive modeling of information search and Web navigation emphasizes the importance of "information scent" (the relevance of semantic cues such as link labels and headings to a reader's goal; Pirolli & Card, 1999). This article shows that not only semantic but also structural knowledge is involved in navigating the Web…