According to most theories of text comprehension, readers construct and store in memory at least two inter-related representations: a text base containing the explicit ideas in a text and a discourse model that contains the overall meaning or "gist" of a text. The authors propose a refinement of this view in which text representations are…

Sometimes, the relationship between form and meaning in language is not one-to-one. Here, we used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to illuminate the neural correlates of such flexible syntax-semantics mappings during sentence comprehension by examining split-intransitivity. While some ("rigid") verbs consistently select one…

An eye-movement study was conducted to examine whether Chinese readers immediately activate and integrate related background information during discourse comprehension. Participants were asked to read short passages, each containing a critical word that fitted well within the local context but was inconsistent or neutral with background…

Discusses the relative contribution of several theoretically relevant skills and abilities in accounting for variance in both word reading and text comprehension. Data is presented from two waves of a longitudinal study. Shows there is a dissociation between the skills and abilities that account for variance in word reading, and those that account…

The notion that inferences contributing to coherence of a text representation are made during reading is examined. It is demonstrated that this idea is an overgeneralization and that one must distinguish between relations internal to the structure of the representation and relations that involve references to the world. (27 references) (Author/LB)

Investigated the role of context constraints on the course of predictive inferences during reading. Constraints were determined by manipulations of a context sentence that affected the extent to which an event was predictable. (Author/VWL)

Investigates the relationship between focusing and coherence relations in pronoun comprehension. Examines a function of connectives: that of signaling coherence relations between two clauses. In three studies, coherence relations between sentence fragments ending in pronouns and participants' continuations to the fragments were identified.…

Examined how skilled adult readers assign meaning to sentences. Of particular interest were sentences containing "experiencer" verbs, which describe states or emotions rather than actions. Subjects were university students in Australia. Test items were semantically implausible sentences. (Author/VWL)

The functional architecture of the verbal processing resource system was studied by testing aphasic patients in Canada and Boston for their abilities to use syntactic structure in sentence comprehension in isolation and under dual-task conditions. Results indicate that the processing resource system underlying syntactic processing is separate from…

Examined masked-form priming in groups of developing and skilled readers (elementary students and adults). In a lexical decision task, children showed significantly greater priming than adults for high N (neighborhood-size) words. A gradual attenuation across age was not found. The results suggest that the adaptation to lexical density may not…