Conversational memory is subject to a number of biases. For instances, references which were reused during dialogue are remembered better than non-reused references. Two experiments examined whether speakers are aware that they are subject to such biases and whether they use information about reference origin (i.e., information about who said…

There has been a long-standing interest in projection and the resources on which participants rely to produce and recognize the import and organization of turns at talk. Less attention has been paid to the character of the activity in which utterances form part and the ways in which embodied action enables the intelligibility, coordination, and in…

Multi-modal discourse comprehension requires speakers to combine information from speech and gestures. To date, little research has addressed the cognitive resources that underlie these processes. Here we used a dual-task paradigm to test the relative importance of verbal and visuospatial working memory in speech-gesture comprehension. Healthy,…

When people interact to establish shared symbols for novel objects or concepts, they often rely on multiple communicative modalities as well as on alignment (i.e., cross-participant repetition of communicative behavior). Yet these interactional resources have rarely been studied together, so little is known about if and how people combine multiple…

According to theories of validation, people routinely check incoming information against prior knowledge during comprehension. On these theories, information is validated if it fits with prior knowledge. Some researchers argue that information needs to be successfully validated before being incorporated into the situation model. We report five…

Informed by a theoretical model of satirical uptake, this study investigated processing behavior and comprehension of satirical news articles. Reading times for segments of minimally different satirical and non-satirical texts were collected using within-subjects (Experiment 1) and between-subjects (Experiment 2) designs. Segment reading times and…

People often speak indirectly. For example, "It's cold in here" might be intended not only as a comment on the temperature but also as a request to turn on the heater. How are comprehenders' inferences about a speaker's intentions informed by their ability to reason about the speaker's mental states, that is, "mentalizing?" We…

Domain restriction is a pervasive if often neglected part of discourse comprehension. Speakers and authors implicitly limit the domain of discourse of quantifiers (e.g., "everyone") and noun phrases (e.g., "the girls"). Our previous research shows that an initial temporal or locative prepositional phrase (PP), which introduces…

This study examined the relationship between refutation texts and attention allocation by focusing on the interaction between important reader-and-text characteristics. Specifically, the authors investigated how prior knowledge and text-based interest affect attention allocation on refutation/control statements, topic, and explanatory and…

The constructed responses individuals generate while reading can provide insights into their coherence-building processes. The current study examined how the cohesion of constructed responses relates to performance on an integrated writing task. Participants (N = 95) completed a multiple document reading task wherein they were prompted to think…

It is well known that English speakers produce fewer pronouns when discourse contexts include more than one entity that matches the gender of the pronoun, i.e., gender effect. It is controversial, however, what causes the gender effect. Some suggest that it results from speakers' avoidance of linguistic ambiguity, while others suggest that it…

Individual differences in reading skill have frequently been related to variability in working memory capacity; however, it is unclear what drives this relation. The present study investigated two attentional control mechanisms that may contribute to this relation: proactive control and online filtering. To examine how the neural mechanisms of…

When apologizing to victims of transgressions, people may assign the agency for harm to themselves ("I'm sorry I offended you"), to the act ("I'm sorry it offended you"), or omit agency altogether ("I'm sorry you were offended"). They also may acknowledge or question the victim's harm by the choice of conjunction used…

People often speak ambiguously, as in the case of "indirect requests." Certain indirect requests are conventional and thus straightforward to interpret, such as "Can you turn on the heater?", but others require substantial additional inference, such as "It's cold in here." How do comprehenders make inferences about a…

While research has repeatedly found evidence that readers infer characters' emotions, we investigate three outstanding questions about the content and time course of such inferences. We ask whether even simple narratives give rise to emotion inferences, in what form such inferences are encoded into long-term memory, and whether they are uniquely…