Situation models in language comprehension and memory.

Zwaan, Rolf A.; Radvansky, Gabriel A.

doi:10.1037/0033-2909.123.2.162

Cited by 2,139 publications

(1,758 citation statements)

References 166 publications

(246 reference statements)

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“…Direct support for this hypothesis came from an experiment in which participants' recognition memory was tested immediately after reading a temporal reference sentence. Information presented just before the temporal reference was recalled less well when the temporal reference indicated a time shift than when no time shift occurred (See also Zwaan, 1996, Rinck & Bower, 2000, and Bower & Rinck, 2001, and see Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998 for a review of related effects). Together, these results support the theory's claim that event segmentation is a form of cognitive control, modulating cognitive processing and memory maintenance.…”

Section: Causes and Consequences Of Segmentation In Story Understandingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Event perception: A mind-brain perspective.

Zacks¹,

Speer²,

Swallow³

et al. 2007

Psychological Bulletin

909

1,018

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People perceive and conceive of activity in terms of discrete events. Here we propose a theory according to which the perception of boundaries between events arises from ongoing perceptual processing and regulates attention and memory. Perceptual systems continuously make predictions about what will happen next. When transient errors in predictions arise, an event boundary is perceived. According to the theory, the perception of events depends on both sensory cues and knowledge structures that represent previously learned information about event parts and inferences about actors' goals and plans. Neurological and neurophysiological data suggest that representations of events may be implemented by structures in the lateral prefrontal cortex and that perceptual prediction error is calculated and evaluated by a processing pathway including the anterior cingulate cortex and subcortical neuromodulatory systems.

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Section: Causes and Consequences Of Segmentation In Story Understandingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Event perception: A mind-brain perspective.

Zacks¹,

Speer²,

Swallow³

et al. 2007

Psychological Bulletin

909

1,018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Research on text comprehension (e.g., Kintsch, 1998) has shown that comprehenders not only construct a deep 'situation model' (Zwaan and Radvansky, 1998) to represent what the discourse is about, but also keep track of what has been said at a somewhat more superficial, propositional level, often referred to as the 'textbase' (Kintsch, 1998). In terms of these two levels of representation, note that "the girl" in (1b) not only sensibly refers to two suitable entities in the situation model, but also indexes (or 'resonates' with, Myers and O'Brien, 1998) two recently activated memory tokens of the concept girl, regardless of their suitability.…”

Section: The Referentially Induced Frontal Negativity (Nref Effect)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Establishing reference in language comprehension: An electrophysiological perspective

Berkum¹,

Koornneef²,

Otten³

et al. 2007

Brain Research

196

214

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The electrophysiology of language comprehension has long been dominated by research on syntactic and semantic integration. However, to understand expressions like "he did it" or "the little girl", combining word meanings in accordance with semantic and syntactic constraints is not enough-readers and listeners also need to work out what or who is being referred to. We review our event-related brain potential research on the processes involved in establishing reference, and present a new experiment in which we examine when and how the implicit causality associated with specific interpersonal verbs affects the interpretation of a referentially ambiguous pronoun. The evidence suggests that upon encountering a singular noun or pronoun, readers and listeners immediately inspect their situation model for a suitable discourse entity, such that they can discriminate between having too many, too few, or exactly the right number of referents within at most half a second. Furthermore, our implicit causality findings indicate that a fragment like "David praised Linda because…" can immediately foreground a particular referent, to the extent that a subsequent "he" is at least initially construed as a syntactic error. In all, our brain potential findings suggest that referential processing is highly incremental, and not necessarily contingent upon the syntax. In addition, they demonstrate that we can use ERPs to relatively selectively keep track of how readers and listeners establish reference. IntroductionWords reliably mean things. In fact, something about word meaning is invariant enough to be listed in a dictionary. Here, for example, is what the Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary lists for the word "girl":girl (noun): 1. a female child or young woman, especially one still at school: "Two girls showed us round the classrooms."Of course, we all know that when a word is placed in the context of other words, shades of meaning can emerge. For "girl", some of the most familiar ones are listed in the dictionary too: girl (noun): ……… 2. a daughter: "We have two girls.", "My little girl is five." 3. [usually plural] a woman worker, especially when seen as one of a group: "shop/office girls" 4. [always plural] one of a group of female friends: "I'm going out with the girls tonight.", "The girls at work gave it to me"

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“…To come to a common understanding, interlocutors need to align their situation models, which are multi-dimensional representations containing information about space, time, causality, intentionality and currently relevant individuals [4][5][6]. The success of conversations depends considerably on the extent to which the interlocutors represent the same elements within their situation models (e.g.…”

Section: Problems Posed By Dialoguementioning

confidence: 99%