Download or read book Narrative Comprehension written by Catherine Emmott and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the current explosion of interest in cognitive linguistics, there has so far been relatively little research by cognitive linguists on narrative comprehension. Catherine Emmott draws on insights from discourse analysis and artificial intelligence to present a detailed model of how readers build, maintain, and use mental representations of fictional contexts, and how they keep track of characters and contexts within a complex, changing fictional world. The study focuses on anaphoric pronouns in narratives, assessing the accumulated knowledge required for readers to interpret these key grammatical items. The work has implications for linguistic theory since it questions several long-held assumptions about anaphora, arguing for a 'levels of consciousness' model for the processing of referring expressions.
Download or read book Strategies of Discourse Comprehension written by Teun A. van Dijk and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Discourse Comprehension written by Charles A. Weaver, III and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is derived from presentations given at a conference hosted in Boulder, Colorado in honor of the 60th birthday of Walter Kintsch. Though the contents of the talks, and thus the chapters, varied widely, all had one thing in common -- they were inspired to some degree by the work of Walter Kintsch. When making plans for an edited book centered around this conference, the editors had a primary goal: to acknowledge the wide variety of researchers and research areas Kintsch had influenced. As a consequence, one of the more unusual elements of this volume is the diversity of the contributors. Researchers from six different countries contributed chapters to this book which is loosely organized around three main thrusts of Kintsch's work: * text-based representations that explain how meaning in a text is constructed, * situation models which represent what the text is about rather than what a text literally says, and * the construction-integration model, Kintsch's most recent work in discourse comprehension.
Download or read book Discourse Comprehension written by Charles A. Weaver and published by Routledge. This book was released on 1995 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Right Hemisphere Language Comprehension written by Mark Jung Beeman and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2013-02-01 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The statement, "The Right Hemisphere (RH) processes language"--while not exactly revolutionary--still provokes vigorous debate. It often elicits the argument that anything the RH does with language is not linguistic but "paralinguistic." The resistance to the notion of RH language processing persists despite the fact that even the earliest observers of Left Hemisphere (LH) language specialization posited some role for the RH in language processing, and evidence attesting to various RH language processes has steadily accrued for more than 30 years. In this volume, chapters pertain to a wide, but by no means, exhaustive set of language comprehension processes for which RH contributions have been demonstrated. The sections are organized around these processes, beginning with initial decoding of written or spoken input, proceeding through semantic processing of single words and sentences, up to comprehension of more complex discourse, as well as problem solving. The chapters assembled here should begin to melt this resistance to evidence of RH language processing. This volume's main goal is to compile evidence about RH language function from a scattered literature. The editorial commentaries concluding each section highlight the relevance of these phenomena for psycholinguistic and neuropsychological theory, and discuss similarities and apparent discrepancies in the findings reported in individual chapters. In the final chapter, common themes that emerge from the enterprise of studying RH language and future challenge for the field are reviewed. Although all chapters focus only on "typical" laterality of right handed people, this work provides a representative sample of the current state of the art in RH language research. Important features include: * a wide range of coverage from speech perception and reading through complex discourse comprehension and problem-solving; * research presented from both empirical and theoretical perspectives; and * commentaries and conclusions integrating findings and theories across sub-domains, and speculating on future directions of the field.
Download or read book Discourse Ability and Brain Damage written by Yves Joanette and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nonspecialists are often surprised by the issues studied and the perspectives assumed by basic scientific researchers. Nowhere has the surprise traditionally been greater than in the field of psychology. College students anticipate that their psychology courses will illuminate their personal problems and their friends' per sonalities; they are nonplussed to discover that the perception of geometric forms and the running ofT-mazes dominates the textbooks. The situation is comparable in the domain of linguistics. Nonprofessional observers assume that linguists study exotic languages, that when they choose to focus on their own language, they will examine the meanings of utterances and the uses to which language is put. Such onlookers are taken aback to learn that the learning of remote languages is a marginal activity for most linguists; they are equally amazed to discover that the lion's share of work in the discipline focuses on issues of syntax and phonol ogy, which are virtually invisible to the speaker of a language. Science moves in its own, often mysterious ways, and there are perfectly good reasons why experimental psychologists prefer to look at mazes rather than at madness, and why linguists study syntax rather than Sanskrit. Nonetheless, it is a happy event for all concerned when the interests of professionals and non specialists begin to move toward one another and a field of study comes to address the "big questions" as well as the experimentally most tractable ones. Discourse Ability and Brain Damage reflects this trend in scientific research.
Download or read book Language and Comprehension written by and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2009-06-05 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language and Comprehension
Download or read book Topic Continuity in Discourse written by T. Givón and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1983-01-01 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The functional notion of “topic” or “topicality” has suffered, traditionally, from two distinct drawbacks. First, it has remained largely ill defined or intuitively defined. And second, quite often its definition boiled down to structure-dependent circularity. This volume represents a major departure from past practices, without rejecting both their intuitive appeal and the many good results yielded by them. First, “topic” and “topicality” are re-analyzed as a scalar property, rather than as an either/or discrete prime. Second, the graded property of “topicality” is firmly connected with sensible cognitive notions culled from gestalt psychology, such as “predictability” or “continuity”. Third, we develop and utilize precise measures and quantified methods by which the property of “topicality” of clausal arguments can be studied in connected discourse, and thus be properly hinged in its rightful context, that of topic identification, maintenance and recoverability in discourse. Fourth, we show that many grammatical phenomena which used to be studied by linguists in isolation, all partake in one functional domain of grammar, that of topic identification. Finally, we demonstrate the validity of this new approach to the study of “topic” and “topicality” by applying the same text-based quantifying method to a number of typologically-diverse languages, in studying actual texts. Languages studied here are: Written and spoken English, spoken Spanish, Biblical Hebrew, Amharic, Hausa, Japanese, Chamorro and Ute.
Download or read book Language Comprehension As Structure Building written by Morton Ann Gernsbacher and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2013-09-05 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Cognitive Processes in Comprehension written by Marcel A. Just and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2013-11-26 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1978. Cognitive Processes in Comprehension is a look at what goes on in the mind of the listener or reader when he hears a sentence during a conversation or reads a passage in a book. For most adults, comprehension is rapid, automatic, and effortless. But, despite its apparent simplicity, comprehension includes a myriad of subprocesses, each of which by itself constitutes a formidable computational task.
Download or read book Aspects of Literary Comprehension written by Rolf A. Zwaan and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Given the fact that there are widely different types of text, it is unlikely that every text is processed in the same way. It is assumed here that for each text type, proficient readers have developed a particular cognitive control system, which regulates the basic operations of text comprehension. The book focuses on the comprehension of literary texts, which involves specific cognitive strategies that enable the reader to respond flexibly to the indeterminacies of the literary reading situation. The study relies heavily on methods and theoretical conceptions from cognitive psychology and presents the results of experiments carried out with real readers. The results are not only relevant to research problems in literary theory, but also to the study of discourse comprehension in general.
Download or read book Reading Comprehension written by Gary Woolley and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-05-21 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading Comprehension: Assisting Children with Learning Difficulties examines the complex nature of reading comprehension. It introduces a model for classifying reading comprehension based on an expanded Simple View of Reading. Issues related to assessment, diagnosis, and remediation of reading comprehension difficulties are discussed and translated into clear recommendations to inform reading intervention design and practice. It gives an informed understanding as to why reading comprehension is difficult for some children with learning disabilities such as ADHD, autism, language difficulties and dyslexia. From leading literacy research, the book develops a deeper understanding of thinking processes that facilitate comprehension at the word, discourse, and metacognitive levels. Children will benefit from the introduction of evidence-based methods for teaching reading comprehension using structured multiple-strategy frameworks.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics written by M. Gareth Gaskell and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2007 with total page 880 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ability to communicate through spoken and written language is one of the defining characteristics of the human race, yet it remains a deeply mysterious process. The young science of psycholinguistics attempts to uncover the mechanisms and representations underlying human language. This interdisciplinary field has seen massive developments over the past decade, with a broad expansion of the research base, and the incorporation of new experimental techniques such as brain imaging and computational modelling. The result is that real progress is being made in the understanding of the key components of language in the mind. The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics brings together the views of 75 leading researchers in psycholinguistics to provide a comprehensive and authoritative review of the current state of the art in psycholinguistics. With almost 50 chapters written by experts in the field, the range and depth of coverage is unequalled. The contributors are eminent in a wide range of fields, including psychology, linguistics, human memory, cognitive neuroscience, bilingualism, genetics, development and neuropsychology. Their contributions are organised into six themed sections, covering word recognition, the mental lexicon, comprehension and discourse, language production, language development, and perspectives on psycholinguistics. The breadth of coverage, coupled with the accessibility of the short chapter format should make the handbook essential reading for both students and researchers in the fields of psychology, linguistics and neuroscience.
Download or read book The Listening Bilingual written by François Grosjean and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-10-30 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vital resource on speech and language processing in bilingual adults and children The Listening Bilingual brings together in one volume the various components of spoken language processing in bilingual adults, infants and children. The book includes a review of speech perception and word recognition; syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of speech processing; the perception and comprehension of bilingual mixed speech (code-switches, borrowings and interferences); and the assessment of bilingual speech perception and comprehension in adults and children in the clinical context. The two main authors as well as selected guest authors, Mark Antoniou, Theres Grüter, Robert J. Hartsuiker, Elizabeth D. Peña and Lisa M. Bedore, and Lu-Feng Shi, introduce the various approaches used in the study of spoken language perception and comprehension in bilingual individuals. The authors focus on experimentation that involves both well-established tasks and newer tasks, as well as techniques used in brain imaging. This important resource: Is the first of its kind to concentrate specifically on spoken language processing in bilingual adults and children. Offers a unique text that covers both fundamental and applied research in bilinguals. Covers a range of topics including speech perception, spoken word recognition, higher level processing, code-switching, and assessment. Presents information on the assessment of bilingual children’s language development Written for advanced undergraduate students in linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, and speech/language pathology as well as researchers, The Listening Bilingual offers a state-of-the-art review of the recent developments and approaches in speech and language processing in bilingual people of all ages.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Processes written by Michael F. Schober and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-22 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second edition of The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Processes provides a state-of-the-art overview of the field of discourse processes, highlighting the subject’s interdisciplinary foundations and bringing together established and emergent scholars to provide a dynamic roadmap of the evolution of the field. This new edition reflects several of the enormous changes in the world since the publication of the first edition—changes in modes of communication and an increased urgency to understand how people comprehend and trust information. The contents of this volume attempt to address fundamental questions about what we should now be thinking about reading, listening, talking, and writing. The chapters collected here represent a wide range of empirical methods currently available: lab or field experiments, with a range of measures, from quantitative to qualitative; observational studies, including classrooms or organizational communication; corpus analyses; conversation analysis; computational modeling; and linguistic analyses. The chapters also draw attention to the explosion of contextually rich and computationally intensive data analysis tools which have changed the research landscape, along with more contemporary measures of people’s discourse use, from eye-tracking to video analysis tools to brain scans. The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Processes, Second edition is the ideal resource for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners in a variety of disciplines, including discourse analysis, conversation analysis, cognitive psychology, and cognitive science.
Download or read book Comprehension written by Walter Kintsch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-01-13 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this landmark volume, Walter Kintsch presents a theory of human text comprehension that he has refined and developed over the past 20 years.
Download or read book Discourse Analysis and Applications written by Ronald L. Bloom and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2013-06-17 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Application of analytic discourse techniques to clinical practice is relatively recent. This book's contributors begin with the notion that systematic examination of discourse provides a rich source of data for describing the complex relationships among language, social context, and the cognitive processes that underlie discourse comprehension and production. Evidence is provided that when discourse is studied across different clinical populations, analysis yields an optimal opportunity for developing dynamic models of brain and language that more thoroughly account for the complexity of language use in social contexts. Accordingly, studies presented in this volume have a dual focus -- to examine the implications of discourse research on neurolinguistic theories and to evaluate the contribution of discourse analysis to understanding the clinical status of patients with brain damage. As such, this volume reports patterns of preserved and impaired discourse behavior in normal adults and in different adult clinical populations. It also describes numerous tasks designed to elicit a variety of discourse genres and a host of techniques created to describe how subjects order information and relate ideas across sentences. In addition, it includes numerous abstract units and linguistic devices targeted to examine those aspects of discourse that govern cohesion, organization, and topic manipulation. This volume is unique because it presents both theoretical and clinical papers that examine a variety of communication pathologies. Clinicians often report dissatisfaction with formal test batteries in that results are often at variance with clinical observation of performance in real life situations. To address this concern, this work proposes methods for examining discourse that move the examiner closer to naturalistic sampling. The research presented demonstrates that discourse analysis provides clinically significant information that contributes to the understanding of the cognitive, linguistic, and social status of people with communication disorders. These studies also offer a framework to support continuously evolving diagnostic and treatment paradigms for adults with neurological communication pathologies.
