Discourse structure and mental models

Bock, J. Kathryn; Brewer, William F.

doi:10.1002/cd.23219852706

Cited by 21 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…Conversely, the expository text evoked more associations, more repetitions, more evaluations and more indications of knowledge-based coherence breaks. Previous research provides various reasons for why one might expect different comprehension processes for narrative texts and expository texts: (a) Narrative texts may elicit more interest, promoting more explanations and predictions than do expository texts (e.g., Olson, Mack, & Duffy, 1981;Schmalhofer & Glavanov, 1986;Trabasso & Magliano, 1996;van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983); (b) narrative texts may promote increased inferencing, resulting, for example, in readers making nine times as many inferences during narrative texts as they made during expository texts (Graesser, 1981); (c) readers have early and extensive practice making inferences while reading narrative texts, because they are used when learning to read and because everyday life is constructed much like a story (Britton, Van Dusen, Glynn, & Hemphill, 1990); (d) the structure of expository texts is more variable than that of narrative texts (Bock & Brewer, 1985); (e) narrative texts may activate schema and script structures that support inference generation (Britton et al, 1990); and (f) narrative texts may rely more on familiar forms of causality than do expository texts, thus prompting more explanations and more predictive inferences. Circumstantial evidence that inferential activities indeed differ during the reading of narrative versus expository texts comes from findings that readers' memory representations for these types of texts differ (Einstein et al, 1990;Zwaan, 1994).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The influence of reading purpose on inference generation and comprehension in reading.

Narváez¹,

Broek²,

Ruíz³

1999

Journal of Educational Psychology

153

123

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There are variations in the extent to which particular types of inferences or activations are made during reading (G. McKoon & R. Ratcliff, 1992;M. Singer, 1994). In this study, the authors investigated the influence of reading purpose (for entertainment or study) on inference generation. Participants read 2 texts aloud and 2 texts for comprehension measures. Reading purpose did not influence off-line behavior (comprehension) but did influence on-line reader behavior (thinking aloud). Readers with a study purpose more often repeated the text, acknowledged a lack of background knowledge, and evaluated the text content and writing than did readers with an entertainment purpose. This pattern was stronger for the expository text than for the narrative text. Reading purpose, and possibly text type, affects the kinds of inferences that readers generate. Hence, inferential activities are at least partially under the reader's strategic control.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The influence of reading purpose on inference generation and comprehension in reading.

Narváez¹,

Broek²,

Ruíz³

1999

Journal of Educational Psychology

153

123

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“…This kind of representation has been dubbed conceptual. We will assume that when comprehension and interpretation are successful, conceptual antecedents are eventually recovered during the resolution of pronominal anaphora (Bock & Brewer, 1985). However, conceptual antecedents may be less likely to form the representation that is immediately created upon first hearing or reading a pronoun.…”

Section: The Cognitive Underpinnings Of Pronoun Interpretationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Representations and Processes in the Production of Pronouns: Some Perspectives from Dutch

Meyer

Bock

1999

Journal of Memory and Language

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The production and interpretation of pronouns involves the identification of a mental referent and, in connected speech or text, a discourse antecedent. One of the few overt signals of the relationship between a pronoun and its antecedent is agreement in features such as number and grammatical gender. To examine how speakers create these signals, two experiments tested conceptual, lexical, and morphophonological accounts of pronoun production in Dutch. The experiments employed sentence completion and continuation tasks with materials containing noun phrases that conflicted or agreed in grammatical gender. The noun phrases served as the antecedents for demonstrative pronouns (in Experiment 1) and relative pronouns (in Experiment 2) that required gender marking. Gender errors were used to assess the nature of the processes that established the link between pronouns and antecedents. There were more gender errors when candidate antecedents conflicted in grammatical gender, counter to the predictions of a pure conceptual hypothesis. Gender marking on candidate antecedents did not change the magnitude of this interference effect, counter to the predictions of an overt-morphology hypothesis. Mirroring previous findings about pronoun comprehension, the results suggest that speakers of gender-marking languages call on specific linguistic information about antecedents in order to select pronouns and that the information consists of specifications of grammatical gender associated with the lemmas of words. © 1999 Academic Press Key Words: language production; pronouns; grammatical agreement.Pronouns can be found in all languages of the world. In English and Dutch they are among the most commonly used words in print (Baayen, Piepenbrock, & van Rijn, 1993) and are probably even more frequent in speech. They are fundamental to both the structure and the function of language. They are nonetheless far from simple in their conditions of use, either linguistically or cognitively, in either comprehension or production. One testimonial to their cognitive complexity comes from language acquisition, where children's problems with pronouns may persist well past the point at which the use of common nouns is firmly established (Clark, 1978;Clark & Sengul, 1978).For adult listeners, the challenges of interpreting pronouns have to do with identifying pronominal referents and antecedents from the minimal feature specifications that pronouns afford. In English, these features include little beyond number, natural gender, and animacy. Some languages add more features to the set, notably grammatical gender, but because the sparse meaning specifications of pronouns are Order of authorship is arbitrary. The research was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation (SBR 94-11627), the National Institutes of Health (R01 HD21011), and visiting research fellowships from the Max Planck Society. We thank Femke van der Meulen and Marianne Wissink for their assistance in preparing the materials and carrying out the experiments, Don...

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“…Some of these theories (Brewer & Lichtenstein, 1981van Dijk, 1976van Dijk, , 1977 were explicitly influenced by the work on text in humanities (see the first paragraph in this section), whereas for other theories (Johnson-Laird, 1980, 1983 the distinction arose out of an independent analysis of the nature of mental representation. Brewer has argued that the event/discourse distinction should play an important role in understanding how global discourse organization affects text comprehension (Bock & Brewer, 1985;Brewer, 1980;Brewer & Lichtenstein, 1982). Brewer assumes that discourse comprehension should be viewed as a process in which a writer/speaker expresses a mental model of the world in discourse form and then a reader/hearer attempts to extract the mental model from the discourse.…”

Section: Event Structure Versus Discourse Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

“…To extract the writer's mental model the reader has to analyze the text at the levels of orthography, word meaning, syntax, propositions, and so forth (Bock & Brewer, 1985;Just & Carpenter, 1977;van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983). However, in this article, we focus on the impact of global discourse structure on the comprehension of temporal order in narratives, Brewer (1980) has pointed out that the author of a text has a number of fundamental options in organizing the discourse structure with respect to the underlying event structure.…”

Section: Global Discourse Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

Discourse organization in the comprehension of temporal order in narrative texts

Ohtsuka

Brewer

1992

Discourse Processes

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We investigated the role of global discourse organization on the comprehension of temporal order in narrative. We proposed three principles of discourse organization: (a) the immediate integration principle-a new event should be integrated immediately with old information, (b) the consistency principle-a new event should be attached to a consistent locus, and (c) the isomorphism principlediscourse structure should match event structure. Five passages varying in discourse structure were presented auditorily, and the comprehension of the underlying event order was tested. Subjects' comprehension was best in the canonical passage. The backward, flashback, and embedded passages were significantly more difficult than the canonical passages. The flashforward passage was the most difficult. The results were interpreted as showing that the immediate integration principle is a strong component of comprehension of temporal order and that the isomorphism principle contributes to text comprehension, but to a lesser degree.The purpose of the present experiment is to investigate the role of global discourse organization on the comprehension of temporal order in narrative texts using experimental narratives in which discourse order and event order were not confounded. To study global discourse structure, we believe that it is necessary to make a clear distinction between the events in the underlying event world and the linguistic representation of these events in a narrative text. The organization of the events in the underlying event world will be referred to as the event structure (E-1, E-2, E-3, etc.), and the temporal arrangements of these events in the text will be referred to as the discourse structure (e-1, e-2, e-3, etc.). For example, given an underlying event sequence such as, 1 APA reference to the published article is: Ohtsuka, K., & Brewer, W. F. (1992). Discourse organization in the comprehension of temporal order in narrative texts. Discourse Processes, 15, 317-336. 2 We would like to thank Ed Lichtenstein, Nelson Skinner, and Jim Treyens for help with some preliminary experiments on text organization, and Marlene Schommer for preparing the tape recordings for the experiment. In addition, we would like to thank Ellen Brewer, Tricia Tenpenny, and Jane Zbrodoff for their comments on an earlier draft of this article.

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Discourse structure and mental models

Cited by 21 publications

References 59 publications

The influence of reading purpose on inference generation and comprehension in reading.

The influence of reading purpose on inference generation and comprehension in reading.

Representations and Processes in the Production of Pronouns: Some Perspectives from Dutch

Discourse organization in the comprehension of temporal order in narrative texts

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