Language Comprehension As Structure Building

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Psychology Press, Sep 5, 2013 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 304 pages
This book presents a new theoretical framework -- what Gernsbacher calls the Structure Building Framework -- for understanding language comprehension in particular, and cognitive processing in general. According to this framework, the goal in comprehending both linguistic and nonlinguistic materials is to build a coherent mental representation or "structure" of the information being comprehended. As such, the underlying processes and mechanisms of structure building are viewed as general, cognitive processes and mechanisms. The strength of the volume lies in its empirical detail: a thorough literature review and solid original data.

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Contents

Chapter
1
The Advantage of First Mention
10
Is the Advantage lost when first and secondmentioned
17
versus Clause Recency
25
Do first clauses form the foundation for their sentencelevel
31
Do comprehenders represent clausal dependencies?
39
The Communicative Function
46
Does Referential Coherence facilitate mapping?
53
What about other levels of anaphoric explicitness?
133
Why are the mechanisms of suppression and enhancement
137
Do cataphoric devices improve their concepts
145
Are cataphorically marked concepts more resistant
151
Suppression and Enhancement
161
INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES
167
Individual Differences in Accessing
175
Individual Differences in Suppression
185

Does Causal Coherence facilitate mapping?
60
Do comprehenders quickly forget information after crossing
70
Why do comprehenders quickly forget the exact form
72
Do comprehenders build separate substructures to represent
78
Chapter 4
84
Are inappropriate meanings mutually inhibited?
94
Does suppression dampen less relevant associations
104
How does an anaphors referent become most activated?
110
Why are concepts as activated before pronouns as after?
117
Do more explicit pronouns trigger suppression more powerfully?
126
Are lessskilled comprehenders less efficient at suppressing
186
information across modalities?
197
Individual Differences in Enhancement
203
CONCLUSIONS
211
Summary
222
How is the Structure Building Framework similar to other
231
What is lost by describing language comprehension at
239
REFERENCES
245
INDEX
277
Copyright

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Morton Ann Gernsbacher

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