The Landscape Model of text comprehension was extended to the comprehension of audiovisual discourse from text and video TV news stories. Concepts from the story were coded for activation after each sequence, creating a matrix of activations that was reduced to a vector of the degree of total activation for each concept. In Study 1, the degree…

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…

Inference is discussed as a factor in the derivation of non-explicit antecedents and referents for three types of discourse anaphora: definite pronouns, "one"-anaphora, and verb phrase ellipsis. This derivation process is seen as being part of the normal process of text-understanding. It is claimed that the use of non-explicit…

This paper discusses the notion that comprehension of language involves an active interpretative process entailing both a generating of expectations and a matching of expectations to the "incoming message." There are, however, two forms of discourse in which the relation of text to message differs from that holding in ordinary language.…

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…

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)

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)

Investigates (in two phases) how coherence is cued between turns in conversations. Indicates that (1) turns were consistently paired well beyond chance, suggesting that explicit cues to connections between turns in conversations do exist; and (2) only lexical devices were found significantly more often in coherent than incoherent pairs. (NKA)

How a child answers questions provides information about how he or she processes input. A child's early responses to questions at age one year, three months, were compared to her responses at one year, seven months, when she was in the two-word stage. (SW)

The study described here offers a model of target-context relations in language comprehension. It is based on the hypothesis that the same formal mechanisms that produce cohesion in discourse and texts are critically involved in language comprehension. The model posits that: (1) the comprehension of a target turn is primarily dependent on the…

Research suggests that interaction between native speakers (NSs) and second language learners (non-native speakers) (NNSs) is characteristically different from speech between NSs, and that it is the modified nature of NS-NNS interaction which provides learners with optimal input. A study was undertaken to determine whether input and interactional…

In a verbal memory study of language development, third- through sixth-grade children read and orally recalled short, expository passages which were presented in three syntactic paraphrase forms: (1) complex sentences with preverbal elaboration such as complex subject nominalizations and relative clauses, (2) complex sentences with postverbal…

Describes two experiments which assessed the ability of adult second language (L2) learners to produce and comprehend real, unreal, and past unreal English conditional sentences. Developmental differences are analyzed in relation to distinctive features. The analyses lend support to the explanatory power of markedness theory in explaining L2…

THIS PAPER DISCUSSES THE THEORY THAT CONTENT ANALYSIS OF MESSAGES IS A CONTRAL TOPIC IN ALL SCIENCES DEALING WITH MAN. CONTENT ANALYSIS IS THE DETERMINATION OF CHARACTERISTICS OF A SOURCE FROM THE NATURAL LANGUAGE UTTERANCES IT EMITS. ASSIGNING PROPERTIES TO WORDS AND THEN COUNTING THE APPEARANCES OF THE PROPERTIES IS INSUFFICIENT--THE CONTENT OF…