Narrative Comprehension

Narrative Comprehension
Author: Catherine Emmott
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 1997
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780198236498

Despite the current explosion of interest in cognitive linguistics, there has so far been relatively little research by cognitive linguists on narrative comprehension. Catherine Emmott draws on insights from discourse analysis and artificial intelligence to present a detailed model of how readers build, maintain, and use mental representations of fictional contexts, and how they keep track of characters and contexts within a complex, changing fictional world. The study focuses on anaphoric pronouns in narratives, assessing the accumulated knowledge required for readers to interpret these key grammatical items. The work has implications for linguistic theory since it questions several long-held assumptions about anaphora, arguing for a 'levels of consciousness' model for the processing of referring expressions.

Aspects of Literary Comprehension

Aspects of Literary Comprehension
Author: Rolf A. Zwaan
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 201
Release: 1993-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9027222177

Given the fact that there are widely different types of text, it is unlikely that every text is processed in the same way. It is assumed here that for each text type, proficient readers have developed a particular cognitive control system, which regulates the basic operations of text comprehension. The book focuses on the comprehension of literary texts, which involves specific cognitive strategies that enable the reader to respond flexibly to the indeterminacies of the literary reading situation. The study relies heavily on methods and theoretical conceptions from cognitive psychology and presents the results of experiments carried out with real readers. The results are not only relevant to research problems in literary theory, but also to the study of discourse comprehension in general.

Discourse Comprehension

Discourse Comprehension
Author: Charles A. Weaver
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 426
Release: 1995
Genre: Comprehension
ISBN: 0805815341

First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

HCI Models, Theories, and Frameworks

HCI Models, Theories, and Frameworks
Author: John M. Carroll
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 579
Release: 2003-05-21
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0080491413

HCI Models, Theories, and Frameworks provides a thorough pedagological survey of the science of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). HCI spans many disciplines and professions, including anthropology, cognitive psychology, computer graphics, graphical design, human factors engineering, interaction design, sociology, and software engineering. While many books and courses now address HCI technology and application areas, none has addressed HCI's multidisciplinary foundations with much scope or depth. This text fills a huge void in the university education and training of HCI students as well as in the lifelong learning and professional development of HCI practitioners. Contributors are leading researchers in the field of HCI. If you teach a second course in HCI, you should consider this book. This book provides a comprehensive understanding of the HCI concepts and methods in use today, presenting enough comparative detail to make primary sources more accessible. Chapters are formatted to facilitate comparisons among the various HCI models. Each chapter focuses on a different level of scientific analysis or approach, but all in an identical format, facilitating comparison and contrast of the various HCI models. Each approach is described in terms of its roots, motivation, and type of HCI problems it typically addresses. The approach is then compared with its nearest neighbors, illustrated in a paradigmatic application, and analyzed in terms of its future. This book is essential reading for professionals, educators, and students in HCI who want to gain a better understanding of the theoretical bases of HCI, and who will make use of a good background, refresher, reference to the field and/or index to the literature. - Contributors are leading researchers in the field of Human-Comptuter Interaction - Fills a major gap in current literature about the rich scientific foundations of HCI - Provides a thorough pedogological survey of the science of HCI

Theory and Practice of Early Reading

Theory and Practice of Early Reading
Author: L. B. Resnick
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2013-12-16
Genre: Education
ISBN: 113587493X

First Published in 1979. These volumes explore the range and depth of our theoretical and practical knowledge about early reading instruction. Contributors-psychologists, linguists, instructional designers, reading and special education experts were asked to address three questions: (1) What is the nature of skilled reading? (2) How is reading skill acquired? (3) What do the nature of skilled reading and the process of acquiring reading skill jointly suggest for reading instruction? This is Volume I of a collection of essays looking at topics such as reading stages, coding and comprehension skills, word recognition, language skills, instruction and teaching theories and an analysis of reading two beginning reading programs.

Topic Continuity in Discourse

Topic Continuity in Discourse
Author: T. Givón
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 498
Release: 1983-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027280258

The functional notion of “topic” or “topicality” has suffered, traditionally, from two distinct drawbacks. First, it has remained largely ill defined or intuitively defined. And second, quite often its definition boiled down to structure-dependent circularity. This volume represents a major departure from past practices, without rejecting both their intuitive appeal and the many good results yielded by them. First, “topic” and “topicality” are re-analyzed as a scalar property, rather than as an either/or discrete prime. Second, the graded property of “topicality” is firmly connected with sensible cognitive notions culled from gestalt psychology, such as “predictability” or “continuity”. Third, we develop and utilize precise measures and quantified methods by which the property of “topicality” of clausal arguments can be studied in connected discourse, and thus be properly hinged in its rightful context, that of topic identification, maintenance and recoverability in discourse. Fourth, we show that many grammatical phenomena which used to be studied by linguists in isolation, all partake in one functional domain of grammar, that of topic identification. Finally, we demonstrate the validity of this new approach to the study of “topic” and “topicality” by applying the same text-based quantifying method to a number of typologically-diverse languages, in studying actual texts. Languages studied here are: Written and spoken English, spoken Spanish, Biblical Hebrew, Amharic, Hausa, Japanese, Chamorro and Ute.

Discourse Markers and (Dis)fluency

Discourse Markers and (Dis)fluency
Author: Ludivine Crible
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2018-04-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027264309

Spoken language is characterized by the occurrence of linguistic devices such as discourse markers (e.g. so, well, you know, I mean) and other so-called “disfluent” phenomena, which reflect the temporal nature of the cognitive mechanisms underlying speech production and comprehension. The purpose of this book is to distinguish between strategic vs. symptomatic uses of these markers on the basis of their combination, function and distribution across several registers in English and French. Through deep quantitative and qualitative analyses of manually annotated features in the new DisFrEn corpus, this usage-based study provides (i) an exhaustive portrait of discourse markers in English and French and (ii) a scale of (dis)fluency against which different configurations of discourse markers can be diagnosed as rather fluent or disfluent. By bringing together discourse markers and (dis)fluency under one coherent framework, this book is a unique contribution to corpus-based pragmatics, discourse analysis and crosslinguistic fluency research.

Cognitive Processes in Comprehension

Cognitive Processes in Comprehension
Author: Marcel A. Just
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2013-11-26
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1317757785

First published in 1978. Cognitive Processes in Comprehension is a look at what goes on in the mind of the listener or reader when he hears a sentence during a conversation or reads a passage in a book. For most adults, comprehension is rapid, automatic, and effortless. But, despite its apparent simplicity, comprehension includes a myriad of subprocesses, each of which by itself constitutes a formidable computational task.

Language and Social Minds

Language and Social Minds
Author: Vittorio Tantucci
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2021-04-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1108484824

Proposes a new empirical model to analyse how humans can express social cognition at different levels of complexity.