Prepositions and verb aspect help guide narrative comprehension by indicating the parts of motion events that are most prominent. Grammatical categories that are important for conveying event structure also help construct a mental model of the events of the narrative. (SED)

Describes two experiments that look at how a reader identifies and represents the major topics in a text and their interrelationships. The first experiment demonstrates that readers show on-line sensitivity to the organization of major text topics. The second experiment investigates the nature of such on-line processing of topic structure. (SED)

Describes experiments on how readers understand a narrative. Results suggest that readers combine information about the characters, events, and places with information about their order of mention in order to assign referents and that this is part of the process of constructing a model that represents the narrative description. (SED)

This study had two major goals: to test the effect of administration method on the criterion validity of a commonly used working memory span test, the reading span task, and to examine the relationship between processing and storage in this task. With respect to the first goal, although experimenter- and participant-administered reading span tasks…

In two experiments, we examined the recent claim (Stewart, Pickering, & Sanford, 2000) that verb-based implicit causality information is used during sentence-final clausal integration only. We did so by looking for mid-sentence reading delays caused by pronouns that are inconsistent with the bias of a preceding implicit causality verb (e.g.,…

Discourse context may affect comprehension of a word in a text by facilitating lexical access or by facilitating integration of the target concept with the preceding text. In two experiments, we used eye tracking measures to examine contextual influence on the integration of role fillers in scripted narratives. In both experiments, context had an…