Discourse Processes

According to multicomponent models (Oakhill & Cain, 2007a), text comprehension is a complex process that requires the processing of explicit (i.e., information presented in the text) and implicit information (i.e., information inferable from the text or from previous knowledge), and involves various components. This study investigated (a) preschoolers' understanding of explicit and implicit information in oral texts and (b) the role of verbal and inferential skills in the processing of explicit and implicit information. Two hundred twenty-one 4- to 6-year-olds were evaluated as to their listening text comprehension and the following components: receptive vocabulary, verbal intelligence, and inferential skills. Working memory was a control variable. Results showed that (a) explicit information was easier to process than implicit information; and (b) all the components considered, except receptive vocabulary, accounted for comprehension of both types of information, and their role was stable in the age range considered.

There is a direct relation between genres of discourse and the definition of literature. A prototype-theoretical perspective on the classification of discourse can reveal that such genres as the novel, the poem, and the play, as well as such superordinate classes of discourse as literature, advertising, and academic writing, are all distinct classes of discourse but at different levels of abstraction. More important, superordinate, basic level, and subordinate classes of discourse have different numbers of typical values for the range of possible discourse attributes. The question of the definition of literature is, hence, Related to the literary genres from which literature is abstracted, although the
study of literary genres and literature is also connected to the study of nonliterary genres and other discourse classes. Such an approach can also explain what goes wrong in some recent proposals on the definition of literary discourse.

In this study we argue that narrative storytelling and expository discussion, as 2 distinct discourse genres, differ both in linguistic expression and in their underlying principles of organization--schema-based in narratives and category-based in exposition. Innovative ...

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--- 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 principle---discourse 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 tex...

Using the software program LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count), this study used political statements classified as truths and lies by website Politifact.com and examined lexical differences between statement type (lie or truth) and the setting (interactive or scripted) in which the statement was given. In interactive settings (where statements given are prompted by questioning), politicians used shorter sentences, simpler words, and fewer causation statements than statements given in scripted settings (where statements are prepared in advance). Lying politicians used more words and negation statements than truth-tellers in both interactive and scripted settings. In interactive settings, politicians used more first-person pronouns. There were no main effects of deception on use of first- and third-person pronouns. Further, there are no effects of deception on use of negative emotion words or profanity. Results are discussed in terms of the importance of setting for studying lexi...

According to the cognitive approach to humor, the comprehension of humorous texts implies recognizing an incongruity and resolving it. This article studies whether the cognitive process involved in the recognition of incongruity is affected by the conditions that make contrariety evident or only analytically recognizable in the perceptual domain. In study 1, participants were asked to choose (condition 1) or rank (condition 2) the best humorous text among three variations of the same jokes in which the critical incongruity was a global, additive, or intermediate contrariety. In studies 2 and 3, they were asked to recognize the critical property on which these three versions of the jokes played. The findings confirmed that the perception of humor and recognition of the critical element was easier when the elements involved in the jokes were opposite in terms of global contrariety (which is the type of contrariety that is perceptually more evident and more easily perceivable).

This study examines the use of politeness routines at the dinner table in the homes of eight middle‐class American families with preschool‐age children. Politeness routines, for example please, thank you, may I please be excused, were used pervasively. In addition, in six of the eight families parents used routinized prompts for eliciting politeness from their children, for example, What do you say? and What's the magic word? The discussion considers the acquisition of routines not only as social markers and as evidence of linguistic socialization, but as having a linguistic function as well. Adults provide children with their earliest lessons in stylistic variation when they insist that the children change the form of their utterances to more polite variants (routines; politeness formulas: linguistic socialization; parental teaching; stylistic variation; developmental pragmatics).

ABSTRACT Several theoretical proposals tried to account for the meaning open-endedness of metaphors in literature and for the effortful process they trigger in readers. However, very few experiments have tackled the neurophysiological underpinnings of literary metaphor. Here we used Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs) to explore the temporal dynamics of comprehending metaphors from Italian poems and novels (e.g., grass of velvet), presented in their original context, as compared with literal expressions (e.g., throne of velvet). Results evidence a more negative ERP response for metaphors, unfolding in an N400 followed by a sustained negativity over frontal sites, suggesting a long-lasting effort in elaborating figurative meanings. Whereas the N400 might be indicative of lexical/semantic processes typical of metaphors and amplified by the literary context, the sustained negativity might reflect the manipulation of multiple meanings in working memory, possibly responsible for the poetic effect. Interestingly, the late negativity effect is driven by familiarity, with a more negative response for those metaphors that are less familiar. These findings offer material to discuss ideas put forward in pragmatics, literary studies, and cognitive neuroscience of literature, like the condensation of weak implicatures, the foregrounding, and the relation between a metaphor and its context.

Deriving representations of meaning, whether at the word, the sentence, or the discourse level, is a problem with a long history in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. In this article, we describe a computational model of high‐dimensional context space, the Hyperspace Analog to Language (HAL), and present simulation evidence that HAL's vector representations can provide sufficient information to make semantic, grammatical, and abstract distinctions. Human participants were able to use the context neighborhoods that HAL generates to match words with similar items and to derive the word (or a similar word) from the neighborhood, thus demonstrating the cognitive compatibility of the representations with human processing. An experiment exploring the meaning of agent‐ and patient‐oriented verbs provided the context for discussing how the connotative aspects of word neighborhoods could provide cues in establishing a discourse model. Using the vector representations to build a sentence‐level representation was attempted, but the results were not promising. This limitation of the representations is presented in the context of other similar models that have been more effective. A final set of experiments explored the nature of verbs and verb instruments, and we introduce a new methodology that extracts conceptual intersections from the high‐dimensional context space.

This study examines longitudinally how mothers structure shared book reading interactions with their children across the preschool period, focusing on possible individual stylistic differences in White, middle‐class mothers' extratextual comments. Analyses addressed consistency of individual maternal styles over time and comparability of storybook reading styles across familiar and unfamiliar stories. At each of two time points, when the children were 40 and 58 months old, mothers read an unfamiliar and a familiar storybook with their children. For readings of each book type, three distinct maternal stylistic groups were found: Describers, Comprehenders, and Collaborators. Most importantly, maternal storybook reading styles are reasonably consistent over the 18‐month time course of study, but are considerably less consistent across types of books. Further, results suggest that these storybook reading styles related differentially to children's print and story skills assessed at 70 months of age. Implications of these individual differences among mothers for emergent literacy are discussed.

After reading text such as Amanda was bouncing all over because she had taken too many tranquilizing sedatives in one day, young adult readers frequently fail to report that they noticed the anomalous noun phrase (NP). Although young readers of all skill levels are susceptible to this kind of ...