Processing of Reference and the Structure of Language: An Analysis of Complex Noun Phrases

Gordon, Peter; Hendrick, Randall; Ledoux, Kerry; Yang, Chin‐Ping

doi:10.1080/016909699386266

Cited by 68 publications

(99 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…Perhaps the biggest difference was the length of the passages; the earlier Glanzer experiments typically used longer experimental passages (usually consisting of eight sentences each) than did ours. Our choice of passages was determined by the ready availability and detailed character-isation of a set of narratives that had been used in several studies of coreference in our lab (Gordon, Hendrick, Ledoux, & Yang, 1999;Gordon & Scearce, 1995). These passages included a direct, well-controlled manipulation of dependency that allowed a comparison of the effects of interruption on more-and less-dependent passages in a concurrent study, the results of which are described elsewhere (Ledoux, 1998).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interruption-similarity effects during discourse processing

Ledoux

Gordon

2006

Memory

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We examined the effect of interruption on reading to determine if discourse processing is susceptible to similarity-based interference. Participants read pairs of passages, either one before the other (in the continuous condition) or with the sentences of the two passages interleaved (in the interruption condition). In addition, the similarity of the types of passages (narrative or expository) in a pair was manipulated. Performance was measured with self-paced reading time of the sentences and with accuracy in answering comprehension questions. In two experiments, interruption slowed the reading of text sentences; this effect of interruption was greatest when the interrupting text was of the same style as the primary text (an interruption-similarity effect). We discuss these results with respect to current models of the role of working memory in discourse processing.Current memory models offer differing character-isations of the information that is maintained and manipulated in working memory during cognitive tasks, and of the structure of working memory itself. Our interest in this paper is in the nature of working memory underlying language comprehension, particularly as it handles interruption during reading. Different views of working memory in language processing lead to different predictions about how interruption should affect the process of reading comprehension.A great deal of research on text memory has demonstrated that some elements of a text (such as the semantic relationships among entities, or situational aspects) are remembered better (with more accuracy and over greater periods of time) than other elements (such as the exact wording of a particular sentence; Bransford & Franks, 1971;Sachs, 1967). This suggests that different types of information from a text are represented and organised differently in memory. Several researchers have described the processes by which text representations are created and maintained (Frederiksen, 1975;Graesser, 1981;Jarvella, 1979;Meyer, 1975). Kintsch and his colleagues (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978; van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983; see also Kintsch, 1985 see also Kintsch, , 1994Kintsch, Welsch, Schmalhofer, & Zimny, 1990) have described three ways in which linguistic information is represented. The surface representation captures several aspects of the text (including lexical and syntactic information) verbatim, and is thus an exact mental representation of the text. The propositional or semantic representation captures the meaning of a text at both a local and a global level. Finally, the situational representation is further removed from the given text than the other two, and represents those aspects of prior knowledge that are triggered by the reading of the text; it is thus a representation based on schematic knowledge. The construction-integration model of discourse processing (Kintsch, 1988; see

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interruption-similarity effects during discourse processing

Ledoux

Gordon

2006

Memory

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“…Finally, the less prominent character (the tiger in Table 2) was introduced in a genitive noun phrase in the last context sentence. Introducing a referent in a genitive noun phrase decreases its discourse prominence in adult comprehension (Badecker and Straub, 2002;Gordon, Hendrick, Ledoux, and Yang, 1999). Using a genitive noun phrase also allowed us to remove the secondary character from sentencefinal position, reducing any countervailing effect of recency of mention.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Discourse prominence effects on 2.5-year-old children's interpretation of pronouns

Song

Fisher

2007

Lingua

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Three experiments examined 2.5-year-olds' sensitivity to discourse structure in pronoun interpretation. Children heard simple two-character stories illustrated by pictures on two video screens. In Experiments 1 and 2, one character in each story was established as more prominent than the other in several context sentences because it was mentioned first, appeared in subject position, was mentioned more often, and was pronominalized once. In Experiment 3, one character was singled out as more prominent only by being mentioned first and placed in subject position. In all three experiments, after hearing a pronoun subject in the final (test) sentence of each story, children looked longer at the character established as more prominent in the preceding sentences. These experiments show that 2.5-year-olds, like older children and adults, interpret pronouns relative to a discourse representation in which referents are ranked in prominence, and that the prominence of discourse referents is influenced by some of the same factors that guide pronoun interpretation in adulthood.

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“…Studies of intersentential coreference have shown that the repeated-name penalty is greater when the antecedent is the subject of the preceding sentence than when it is the object (Gordon et al, 1993;Gordon & Chan, 1995;Kennison & Gordon, 1997). Studies of both intersentential and intrasentential coreference have shown that the repeated name penalty is greater when the antecedent is the head noun than when it is embedded in a conjunct or when it is a possessive (Gordon, Ledoux, & Hendrick, 1997). The importance of syntactic prominence that emerges from studies of judgment and reading time is corroborated by results obtained on natural-language copora using syntax-based algorithms for pronoun resolution.…”

Section: Effects Of Syntactic Prominence On Coreferencementioning

confidence: 99%

The representation and processing of coreference in discourse

1998

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The phenomenon of coreference-where two linguistic expressions refer to the same thing-is a central topic in attempts to understand the meaning and structure of language. This is true both for disciplines that attempt to model knowledge of language and for disciplines that attempt to model language processing. Despite their often divergent goals, the disciplines of generative linguistics, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics and formal semantics have all expended considerable energy on aspects of coreference, particularly on the distinction between coreference with full referring expressions, such as names or descriptions, and with reduced referring expressions, such as pronouns. We believe that progress in these different disciplines has provided important ideas that converge in the Direct all correspondence to: Peter C. Gordon, Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3270; E-Mail: pcg@email.unc.edu; Randall Hendrick, Department of Linguistics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3155; E-Mail: hendrick@email.unc.edu. 389 390GORDON AND HENDRICK domain of local coreference, that is coreference within sentences and short strings of sentences that are semantically coherent. In this paper we attempt to integrate that progress in such a way as to provide a unified account that addresses some of the central concerns of each of these disciplines. This account is based on the following principles: (1) The primary function of pronouns (and other reduced expressions) is to refer to things that have already been mentioned in a discourse and which are mentally represented in a discourse model; therefore pronouns are the natural vehicle for coreference. In contrast, the primary function of names (and of other full expressions) is to introduce entities into the discourse model; therefore coreference with repeated names requires additional mental processes. (2) The syntactic and sequential structure of language strongly influence mental representation in the discourse model which in turn influences the interpretation of referring expressions in linguistic input. (3) The discourse model is constructed incrementally with each utterance directly adding conditions that further specify the meaning embodied in the model; exceptions to this direct incremental construction occur in well-marked cases where linguistic forms indicate that a phrase or clause serves to modify the meanings that follow it rather than the meanings that precede it.The paper is organized as follows: First, we briefly review how reference and coreference are approached by different disciplines within cognitive science, with particular attention on how the work contributes to the present effort. Next, we sketch out some basics of the approach taken towards coreference in Kamp and Reyle's (1993) Discourse Representation Theory; our work employs the mechanisms developed in that approach to formal semantics. The main body of our work then shows how the three principles outlin...

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Processing of Reference and the Structure of Language: An Analysis of Complex Noun Phrases

Cited by 68 publications

References 31 publications

Interruption-similarity effects during discourse processing

Interruption-similarity effects during discourse processing

Discourse prominence effects on 2.5-year-old children's interpretation of pronouns

The representation and processing of coreference in discourse

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