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Psycholinguists have tended to study reference to people and objects using definite noun phrases of various kinds, including pronouns. Formal semanticists take a broader and more general view of reference. Understanding and producing... more
Psycholinguists have tended to study reference to people and objects using definite noun phrases of various kinds, including pronouns. Formal semanticists take a broader and more general view of reference. Understanding and producing successful referring expressions is mediated by mental representations of situations. Psycholinguists have studied the coordination of referential expressions between speakers and the role of referential factors in syntactic processing. However, their principal concern has been with anaphoric reference. Many factors have been identified that affect the ease or difficulty of processing anaphoric references. More recently, attempts have been made to produce more principled accounts of this process.
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An excellent introduction to artificial intelligence (AI) - the science of thinking machines.
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We present a Focused Review on work that was conducted to compare perceived distributions of men and women in occupations and other social roles with actual real world distributions. In previous work, we showed that means for the two... more
We present a Focused Review on work that was conducted to compare perceived distributions of men and women in occupations and other social roles with actual real world distributions. In previous work, we showed that means for the two sources were similar and the correlation between them was high. However, in the present paper, although we argue that comparing subjective gender stereotype norms and real world data about gender ratios is an interesting endeavor, we also discuss the limits to and difficulties in trying to determine the causal relationship between them. Most crucially, we argue that our data does not allow us to deduce with certainty that subjective gender norms are based directly on gender ratios.
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2 Mental Models in Discourse Processing and Reasoning G. Rickheit and C. Habel (Editors) 1999 Elsevier Science BV All rights reserved. WHAT'S IN A MENTAL MODEL? Alan Garnham, University of Sussex, UK INTRODUCTION The idea that... more
2 Mental Models in Discourse Processing and Reasoning G. Rickheit and C. Habel (Editors) 1999 Elsevier Science BV All rights reserved. WHAT'S IN A MENTAL MODEL? Alan Garnham, University of Sussex, UK INTRODUCTION The idea that readers and listeners ...
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One of the central problems in psycholinguistics is to explain how people put together the information from the separate parts of a discourse to form an integrated representation of its content.1 The content of a discourse is one aspect... more
One of the central problems in psycholinguistics is to explain how people put together the information from the separate parts of a discourse to form an integrated representation of its content.1 The content of a discourse is one aspect of its meaning — other aspects include its pragmatic and rhetorical significance. The problem, therefore, is one about the way the meaning of discourse is computed. A theory about the computation of meaning depends on an account of the meanings that discourses can have — an account psycholinguistics might have hoped to borrow from linguistics, but which they were never able to (see the Introduction to this volume for a discussion of why linguistic accounts of meaning have had little impact in psycholinguistics).
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First published 2001 by Psychology Press Ltd 27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex, BN3 2FA www.psypress.co.uk Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Taylor & Francis Inc. 325 Chestnut Street, Suite 800, Philadelphia,... more
First published 2001 by Psychology Press Ltd 27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex, BN3 2FA www.psypress.co.uk Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Taylor & Francis Inc. 325 Chestnut Street, Suite 800, Philadelphia, PA 19106 Psychology Press is part of ...
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Elliptical verb phrases must be interpreted indirectly, using a representation of the surface form of nearby (usually preceding) text. We used this fact to demonstrate the different availability of superficial representations of the two... more
Elliptical verb phrases must be interpreted indirectly, using a representation of the surface form of nearby (usually preceding) text. We used this fact to demonstrate the different availability of superficial representations of the two clauses in main-subordinate pairs. The acceptability of a later ellipsis was reduced when it took its meaning from a main clause that was followed by a subordinate clause, as compared with other combinations. In addition, positive acceptability judgements were made more quickly (1) when the antecedent clause was subordinate, rather than main, suggesting that the superficial form of a subordinate clause is more important, and (2) when the antecedent was in the immediately preceding clause, rather than two clauses back. These results support the idea that the surface form of subordinate clauses is selectively retained until the corresponding main clause has been read, but the surface form of a main clause is not retained after it has been interpreted.
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In a recent paper entitled 'Against Logicist Cognitive Science', Mike Oaksford and Nick Chater (1991; henceforth 0 & C) have argued that cognitive science, as it is classically conceived, is not... more
In a recent paper entitled 'Against Logicist Cognitive Science', Mike Oaksford and Nick Chater (1991; henceforth 0 & C) have argued that cognitive science, as it is classically conceived, is not possible. More specifically they argue against a particular conception of cognitive ...
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Two subject-paced reading experiments were carried out to examine the way in which discourse information exerts its influence in sentence comprehension. The results show that whereas prior discourse context appears to affect the way in... more
Two subject-paced reading experiments were carried out to examine the way in which discourse information exerts its influence in sentence comprehension. The results show that whereas prior discourse context appears to affect the way in which sentences are ultimately parsed, ...
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Page 1. T Manual de psicología del pensamiento Alan Garnham Jane Oakhill Paidós Page 2. Alan Garnham, doctor en Psicología Experimental por la Universidad de Sussex, trabaja como investigador y profesor de esta misma institución. ...
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According to one version of the mental models theory (Oakhill, J.V., Johnson-Laird, P.N., Garnham, A., 1989. Believability and syllogistic reasoning. Cognition 31, 117-140) beliefs exert their influence on reasoning in three ways. First... more
According to one version of the mental models theory (Oakhill, J.V., Johnson-Laird, P.N., Garnham, A., 1989. Believability and syllogistic reasoning. Cognition 31, 117-140) beliefs exert their influence on reasoning in three ways. First they can affect the interpretation of the premises, for example by conversion. Second, they can curtail the search for alternative models of the premises, if an initial model supports a believable conclusion. Third, they can act as a filter on any conclusion that is eventually generated. This last influence is important in explaining the effects of belief bias in one-model syllogisms with no convertible premises, since such syllogisms, by definition, have no alternative models. However, the most natural interpretation of such a filter is that it filters out conclusions and leads to the response 'no valid conclusion'. The present study, which was conducted with groups of both British and Italian subjects, looked at the effect of prior knowledge on syllogistic reasoning, and showed that: (1) invalid conclusions for such one model syllogisms, either thematic or abstract, are typically not of the type 'no valid conclusion', but state invalid relations between the end terms; (2) belief-bias is completely suppressed when previous knowledge is incompatible with the premises, and therefore the premises themselves are always considered. The results are compatible with a version of the mental models theory in which a representation of prior knowledge precedes modelling of the premises, which are then incorporated into the representation of this knowledge. The relation between this theory and other accounts of belief bias in syllogistic reasoning, and the implications of these findings for reasoning more generally, are considered.
Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Semantics, Mental Representation, Cognition, and 15 moreReading, Medicine, Problem Solving, Humans, Concept Formation, Female, Male, Prior Knowledge, Language Culture and Communication, MENTAL MODEL, Syllogism, Adult, Belief Bias, Representation Politics, and Psychology and Cognitive Sciences
Abstract A number of current theories of story understanding are based on the idea of a mentally embodied story grammar. Recent discussions of the adequacy of such theories have been inconclusive. In this paper it is argued that story... more
Abstract A number of current theories of story understanding are based on the idea of a mentally embodied story grammar. Recent discussions of the adequacy of such theories have been inconclusive. In this paper it is argued that story grammarians have omitted to ...
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This paper presents a unified account of the meaning of the spatial relational terms right, left, in front of, behind, above and below. It claims that each term has three types of meanings, basic, deictic and intrinsic, and that the... more
This paper presents a unified account of the meaning of the spatial relational terms right, left, in front of, behind, above and below. It claims that each term has three types of meanings, basic, deictic and intrinsic, and that the definitions of each type of meaning are identical in form for all six terms. Restrictions on the use of the terms, which are different for above and below than for the rest, are explained by a general constraint on all uses of spatial relational terms, the framework vertical constraint. This constraint depends on the existence of a fourth type of meaning for above and below, one defined by the framework in which the related objects are located. It is argued that a theory centred on the framework vertical constraint is preferable to one centred on the principle of canonical orientation (Levelt, 1984).
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1. Cognition. 1991 May;39(2):167-70; discussion 171-2. Did two farmers leave or three? Comment on Starkey, Spelke, and Gelman: numerical abstraction by human infants. Garnham A. Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Sussex,... more
1. Cognition. 1991 May;39(2):167-70; discussion 171-2. Did two farmers leave or three? Comment on Starkey, Spelke, and Gelman: numerical abstraction by human infants. Garnham A. Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. ...
Research Interests: Psychology, Metaphysics, Epistemology, Cognition, Economic Justice, and 14 moreAttention, Child Clinical Psychology, Abstraction, Medicine, Problem Solving, Humans, Concept Formation, Child Psychology, Child and Adolescent Psychology, Infant, Normative, Language Culture and Communication, Abnormal Child Psychology, and Psychology and Cognitive Sciences
Experiments using memory paradigms have shown that general terms receive context‐dependent encodings. The results of these experiments can only provide indirect evidence about representations set up at the time of presentation. Those... more
Experiments using memory paradigms have shown that general terms receive context‐dependent encodings. The results of these experiments can only provide indirect evidence about representations set up at the time of presentation. Those studies which have concerned themselves with on‐line processing of general terms have produced only equivocal results. The present experiment investigates the encoding of category and instance nouns as a function of (i) whether their referents were previously described by category or instance nouns; (ii) whether preceding context suggests what kind of thing is being referred to. Where context gives no specific information about a category member, the occurrence of an instance noun in a following sentence provides extra new information about its referent. It was found that this extra new information takes time to process. However, when context has already suggested an instantiation of a category noun, then the later occurrence of the appropriate instance...
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APA PsycNET Our Apologies! - The following features are not available with your current Browser configuration. - alerts user that their session is about to expire - display, print, save, export, and email selected records - get My ...
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of the original article: Story grammars have been proposed as a means of expressing a theory of stories. Story grammarians claim that stories are a linguistic form in much the same sense that sentences are, and that we can attribute... more
of the original article: Story grammars have been proposed as a means of expressing a theory of stories. Story grammarians claim that stories are a linguistic form in much the same sense that sentences are, and that we can attribute constitutent structure to stories in much the same way we attribute it to sentences. Just as sentences and their constituent structure can be characterized by sentence grammars, so stories and their constituent structure can be characterized by a story grammar. However, the analogy between story grammars and sentence grammars is ill conceived. It is based on a category error that assumes stories to be textual entities like sentences. This is demonstrably not the case. Moreover, this confusion is the cause of most of the misunderstandings about story grammars and what they can accomplish. Once this mistake is acknowledged, the possible contribution of story grammars to a theory of stories is considerably diminished. In place of story grammars, the theory of story points seems a more promising route to a meaningful theory of stories. The theory is being used as a component of a computer story-understanding system under development at Berkeley. In addition, some very preliminary experiments conducted on the basis of this approach seem to lend it some psychological plausibility. A theory of stories?
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reflected in the organization of a wide selection of erstwhile non-spatial semantic fields: he claims that fields differ only in terms of the sorts of entities that may appear as theme and reference objects, and in terms of the kind of... more
reflected in the organization of a wide selection of erstwhile non-spatial semantic fields: he claims that fields differ only in terms of the sorts of entities that may appear as theme and reference objects, and in terms of the kind of relation that takes on the role played by location in the field of spatial expressions. The exact mechanism of this generalization from spatial to nonspatial fields is left unspecified, although Jackendoff does hint at some innate foundation. Jackendoff ends with some general principles of representation addressing the question of transparent and opaque contexts. His argument is that the reference of a term in a transparent context is an object in the projected world, whereas in an opaque context it is a “representation” of that object. The important point is that the two readings of the same term are formally identical at the level of conceptual structure; the reading will depend upon a REP operator, which performs the appropriate mapping. From this the familiar qualities of belief (opaque) contexts follow: failure of existential generalization and failure of substitution of co-referential terms. Jackendoff’s coda on truth reflects his concern to avoid the standard realist assumptions: he is concerned more with the nature of such locutions as “‘Xis a Y’ is true”, than with what might be said to make them true. The foundational role of truth is thus largely to be replaced by satisfaction of CC and GC. Whether this confers any greater explanatory adequacy is open to debate. A related issue is that, although he denies that the medium of interpretation is configured according to logical principles, we could envisage such a configuring for conceptual structure whilst allowing that lexical items map into it after the fashion of preference rules. Such are the issues generating the intellectual tension that makes the book an exciting contribution to cognitive science.
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This chapter on pragmatics and inference provides an overview of the central topics of linguistic pragmatics, while emphasizing that pragmatics has had, with some notable exceptions, only a limited and indirect influence on work in... more
This chapter on pragmatics and inference provides an overview of the central topics of linguistic pragmatics, while emphasizing that pragmatics has had, with some notable exceptions, only a limited and indirect influence on work in psycholinguistics. Nevertheless, many of the phenomena studied under the head of “inference” in psycholinguistics, are related to pragmatic phenomena such as presupposition, implicature, and the interpretation of figurative language. The main part of the chapter provides an overview of psycholinguistic research on inference, starting with the work of Bransford in the 1970s, and considering questions about what inferences are made and when, including the notion of good-enough representations. The roles spreading activation, mental, or situation models, and embodiment in inference-making are also considered.
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Mental models or situation models include representations of people, but much of the literature about such models focuses on the representation of eventualities (events, states, and processes) or (small-scale) situations. In the... more
Mental models or situation models include representations of people, but much of the literature about such models focuses on the representation of eventualities (events, states, and processes) or (small-scale) situations. In the well-known event-indexing model of Zwaan, Langston, and Graesser (1995), for example, protagonists are just one of five dimensions on which situation models are indexed. They are not given any additional special status. Consideration of longer narratives, and the ways in which readers or listeners relate to them, suggest that people have a more central status in the way we think about texts, and hence in discourse representations, Indeed, such considerations suggest that discourse representations are organised around (the representations of) central characters. The paper develops the idea of the centrality of main characters in representations of longer texts, by considering, among other things, the way information is presented in novels, with L’Éducation Se...
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Previous research, for example in English, French, German, and Spanish, has investigated the interplay between grammatical gender information and stereotype gender information (e.g., that secretaries are usually female, in many cultures),... more
Previous research, for example in English, French, German, and Spanish, has investigated the interplay between grammatical gender information and stereotype gender information (e.g., that secretaries are usually female, in many cultures), in the interpretation of both singular noun phrases (the secretary) and plural nouns phrases, particularly so-called generic masculines-nouns that have masculine grammatical gender but that should be able to refer to both groups of men and mixed groups of men and women. Since the studies have been conducted in cultures with broadly similar stereotypes, the effects generally reflect differences in the grammatical systems of the languages. Russian has a more complex grammatical gender system than the languages previously studied, and, unlike those languages frequently presents examples in which grammatical gender is marked on the predicate (in an inflection on the verb). In this study we collected stereotype norms for 160 role names in Russian, provi...
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Publisher Summary Since the late 1960, it has been a commonplace in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence that listeners and readers make many inferences in their attempts to understand discourse and text. Inferences serve a... more
Publisher Summary Since the late 1960, it has been a commonplace in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence that listeners and readers make many inferences in their attempts to understand discourse and text. Inferences serve a variety of functions in text comprehension. Among other things, they can be used to identify an unclearly pronounced word, to resolve a lexical ambiguity, to determine the referent of a pronoun, and to compute an intended message from a literal meaning. This chapter focuses on one particular function of inference—linking information from different parts of a text to establish its literal meaning. Occasionally, people are called upon to make deductions or mathematical inferences from texts—an example would be in solving a textbook mechanics problem. However, people do not make such inferences readily or automatically—logic and mathematics are difficult and have to be taught. Most of the inferences that people make from texts—inferences they find very much easier—are not deductions. A deductive inference is the one in which the conclusion must be true, if the premises are.
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1 Chapter 1 Observations on the Past and Future of Psycholinguistics Alan Garnham, Simon Garrod, and Anthony Sanford Do you mean ... between the breakdown of the early period of Sprachpsychologie, as he called it, and the prematurely... more
1 Chapter 1 Observations on the Past and Future of Psycholinguistics Alan Garnham, Simon Garrod, and Anthony Sanford Do you mean ... between the breakdown of the early period of Sprachpsychologie, as he called it, and the prematurely announced (Reber, 1987) demise of ...
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Reading-time experiments on anaphor resolution have produced conflicting results. Some studies have been taken to support a schema-based theory of text comprehension, which claims that the ease of interpreting an anaphor depends on the... more
Reading-time experiments on anaphor resolution have produced conflicting results. Some studies have been taken to support a schema-based theory of text comprehension, which claims that the ease of interpreting an anaphor depends on the schemata that are currently activated. Other studies suggest that more specific factors, such as the amount of new information carried by an anaphor, affect the amount of time needed to understand it. This paper reports an experiment designed to confirm the importance of an anaphor's information content in determining how much processing it requires. The experiment also investigates the role of schemata in anaphor resolution. It provides no evidence for schema-based processing. However, it is difficult to decide whether the materials used in the experiment should produce schematic effects. It is argued that this is a fault of schema theory, and unless this fault is rectified the theory cannot be regarded as a serious contender for an account of an...
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When readers are faced with part of a sentence that is locally ambiguous in structure, they typically assign that part of the sentence one structure, and hence one interpretation. For example, the “that-clause” in Thefireman told the... more
When readers are faced with part of a sentence that is locally ambiguous in structure, they typically assign that part of the sentence one structure, and hence one interpretation. For example, the “that-clause” in Thefireman told the woman that he had rescued... might turn ...