Plural phrases are open to many interpretations in English, where cumulative interpretations of noun and verb phrases are possible without any disambiguating morphology. A sentence like might involve quantifying over multiple occurrences of a single scenario, in which subsets of the kids do different things, or it might involve quantifying over distinct scenarios, in which all of the kids do one thing or all of them do the other. In the present work and related earlier work (Harris et al., 2013), we pursue the No Extra Times principle that favors interpretations where a phrase is construed as describing a single event taking place during a given time period. In two written interpretation studies, we found that participants more often interpret indeterminate sentences with disjunctive predicates by partitioning the set of individuals rather than partitioning the predicate to denote distinct scenarios or times. We conclude by offering some speculations about why partitioning the eventuality denoted by the verb phrase into multiple times is more costly than partitioning the entities denoted by its subject noun phrase into multiple sets.

The goal of this study was to examine predictions derived from the Lexical Quality Hypothesis (Perfetti & Hart, 2002; Perfetti, 2007) regarding relations among word-decoding, working-memory capacity, and the ability to integrate new concepts into a developing discourse representation. Hierarchical Linear Modeling was used to quantify the effects of two text properties (length and number of new concepts) on reading times of focal and spillover sentences, with variance in those effects estimated as a function of individual difference factors (decoding, vocabulary, print exposure, and working-memory capacity). The analysis revealed complex, cross-level interactions that complement the Lexical Quality Hypothesis.

Four experiments investigate the influence of topic status and givenness on how speakers and writers structure sentences. The results of these experiments show that when a referent is previously given, it is more likely to be produced early in both sentences and word lists, confirming prior work showing that givenness increases the accessibility of given referents. When a referent is previously given and assigned topic status, it is even more likely to be produced early in a sentence, but not in a word list. Thus, there appears to be an early mention advantage for topics that is present in both written and spoken modalities, but is specific to sentence production. These results suggest that information-structure constructs like topic exert an influence that is not based only on increased accessibility, but also reflects mapping to syntactic structure during sentence production.

Three experiments investigated how readers manage their mental representations during narrative comprehension. The first experiment investigated whether readers' access to their mental representations of the main character in a narrative becomes enhanced (producing a "benefit") when the character is rementioned; the first experiment also investigated whether readers' access to the main character in a narrative becomes weakened or interfered with (producing a "cost") when a new character is introduced. The purpose of the second experiment was to ensure that there was nothing unusually salient about the accessibility of names; thus, we assessed readers' access to an object associated with the main character rather than the character's name. Again, readers demonstrated increased accessibility to the main character when it was rementioned in the narrative, and readers demonstrated reduced accessibility to the main character when a new character was introduced. A third experiment compared more-skilled and less-skilled readers' abilities to manage these mental representations during narrative comprehension. Findings were consistent with research suggesting that more-skilled readers are more skilled at attenuating interfering information (i.e., suppression). Data from all 3 experiments suggest that successful narrative comprehension involves managing mental representations of salient and often times interfering characters.

Accessibility is one of the most important challenges at the intersection of linguistic and psycholinguistic studies of text and discourse processing. Linguists have shown how linguistic indicators of referential coherence show a systematic pattern: Longer linguistic forms (like full lexical NPs) tend to be used when referents are relatively low accessible, shorter forms (pronouns and zero anaphora) are used when referents are highly accessible. This linguistic theory fits in nicely with a dynamic view of text and discourse processing: When a reader proceeds through a text, the activation of concepts as part of the reader's representation fluctuates constantly. Hypotheses considering activation patterns can be tested with on-line research methods like reading time or eye-movement recording. The articles in this special issue show how accessibility phenomena need to be studied from a linguistic and a psycholinguistic angle, and in the latter case from interpretation as well as production.

The objective of this study was to determine how readers process narrative texts when the main character has multiple, and changing, goals. Readers must keep track of such goals to understand the causal relations between text events, an important process for comprehension. The structure building framework theory of reading proposes that readers maintain the most relevant goal in focus using the mechanism of suppression. The results of this study confirm that readers maintain the activation of goal information that is rementioned in a text and suppress previous goal information when a new goal is introduced. Thus, in an attempt to understand the causal relations between events in a text, readers keep track of multiple story character goals by using suppression.

During the past decade I have been developing a very simple framework for describing the cognitive processes and mechanisms involved in discourse comprehension. I call this framework the Structure Building Framework, and it is based on evidence provided during the first decade of discourse processing research. According to the Structure Building Framework, the goal of comprehension is to build coherent mental representations or . Comprehenders build each structure by first laying a foundation. Comprehenders develop mental structures by mapping on new information when that information coheres or relates to previous information. However, when the incoming information is less related, comprehenders shift and attach a new substructure. The building blocks of mental structures are memory nodes, which are activated by incoming stimuli and controlled by two cognitive mechanisms: suppression and enhancement. In this article, first I review the seminal work on which the Structure Building Framework is based (the first decade of structure building research); then I recount the research I have conducted to test the Structure Building Framework (the second decade of structure building research).

Three experiments examined how readers inferred spatial information that was relevant to a story character's movements through a previously memorized layout of a fictional building relative to various tasks. This study also examined how inference measures were related to spatial imagery and reading comprehension ability. Replicating the spatial separation effect reported by Morrow, Greenspan, and Bower (1987), probed objects were responded to faster when they were located in the same room of a building as the main character of a narrative than when the objects were located in different rooms. Experiment 2 ruled out a simple name-based priming explanation of the spatial separation effect, and Experiment 3 demonstrated a facilitation for objects from the character's target room even when readers were provided with a spatially indeterminate list description of the building. The construction-integration model of text comprehension accounted for the spatial separation effect in terms of variations in the knowledge-integration process. It was concluded that the integration of an enriched knowledge network can facilitate the process of mapping text information onto a developing mental representation of a discourse situation, a process that gains further support from spatial imagery and reading comprehension ability.

Three experiments illustrated that readers will not completely comprehend the sentences they read unless sufficiently motivated by situational demands. Complete comprehension of a topic is defined as the ability to accurately redescribe that topic in one's own words, and it entails three separate yet interdependent processing tasks: (a) activating the information contained in a topic, (b) resolving the topic as a new topic or as an anaphor referring to an old topic, and (c) modifying one's mental structures to organize the additional information that is received. Each process hinges on the outcome of those that preceded it, and comprehenders are not expected to initiate the next process in the sequence unless it is required or motivated by task demands. To test these predictions, three experiments were conducted in which participants were prompted to engage in one, two, or all three comprehension processes after reading two-clause conjunctive sentences. The results suggested that experimental participants had a strategy of minimal task satisfaction: They did not resolve anaphors, build structures, or draw inferences unless it was necessary for completion of the experiment.

Stories are a powerful means to change people's attitudes and beliefs. The aim of the current work was to shed light on the role of argument strength (argument quality) in narrative persuasion. The present study examined the influence of strong versus weak arguments on attitudes in a low or high narrative context. Moreover, baseline attitudes, interindividual differences in working memory capacity, and recipients' transportation were examined. Stories with strong arguments were more persuasive than stories with weak arguments. This main effect was qualified by a two-way interaction with baseline attitude, revealing that argument strength had a greater impact on individuals who initially were particularly doubtful toward the story claim. Furthermore, we identified a three-way interaction showing that argument strength mattered most for recipients who were deeply transported into the story world in stories that followed a typical narrative structure. These findings provide an important specification of narrative persuasion theory.

The comprehension of connectives is crucial for understanding the discourse relations that make up a text. We studied connective comprehension in English to investigate whether adult comprehenders acquire the meaning and intended use of connectives to a similar extent and how connective features and individual differences impact connective comprehension. A coherence judgment study indicated that differences in how well people comprehend connectives depend on the lexical transparency but not on the frequency of the connective. Furthermore, individual variation between participants can be explained by their vocabulary size, nonverbal IQ, and cognitive reasoning style. Print exposure was not found to be relevant. These findings provide further insight into the factors that influence discourse processing and highlight the need to consider individual differences in discourse comprehension research as well as the need to examine a wider range of connectives in empirical studies of discourse markers.

Research into the persuasiveness of satirical news has found mixed results. Two possible explanations lie in the lack of clarity about mechanisms underlying the influence of consuming different types of satirical content. In six experiments (  = 3,139), we investigated how (different types of) humorous versus nonhumorous (satirical) messages influenced recipients' cognitive, emotional, and excitative responses and how these responses in turn influenced their attitudes. Results show that attitudes were influenced through recipients' cognitive and emotional reactions to the stimuli but in opposite directions. This suppressed an overall effect on attitudes: Consuming humorous satirical messages led to more message-agreement because the messages were more humorous, and recipients felt less angry, while this consumption led to less message-agreement because the messages were discounted more, and recipients felt less worried. Our results highlight the importance of distinguishing between different types of satirical news content (humorous vs. nonhumorous) when studying satire's persuasiveness.

We report 3 experiments that examined younger and older adults' reliance on "good-enough" interpretations for garden-path sentences (e.g., "While Anna dressed the baby played in the crib") as indicated by their responding "Yes" to questions probing the initial, syntactically unlicensed interpretation (e.g., "Did Anna dress the baby?"). The manipulation of several factors expected to influence the probability of generating or maintaining the unlicensed interpretation resulted in 2 major age differences: Older adults were generally more likely to endorse the incorrect interpretation for sentences containing optionally transitive verbs (e.g., hunted, paid), and they showed decreased availability of the correct interpretation of subordinate clauses containing reflexive absolute transitive verbs (e.g., dress, bathe). These age differences may in part be linked to older adults' increased reliance on heuristic-like good-enough processing to compensate for age-related deficits in working memory capacity. The results support previous studies suggesting that syntactic reanalysis may not be an all-or-nothing process and might not be completed unless questions probing unresolved aspects of the sentence structure challenge the resultant interpretation.

We segment what we read into meaningful events, each separated by a discrete boundary. How does event segmentation during encoding relate to the structure of story information in long-term memory? To evaluate this question, participants read stories of fictional historical events and then engaged in a post-reading verb arrangement task. In this task, participants saw verbs from each of the events placed randomly on a computer screen, and then they arranged the verbs into groups onscreen based on their understanding of the story. Participants who successfully comprehended the story placed verbs from the same event closer to each other than verbs from different events, even after controlling for orthographic, text-based, semantic, and situational overlap between verbs. Thus, how people structure story information into separate events during online comprehension is associated with how that information is stored in memory. Specifically, story information within an event is bound together in memory more so than information between events.

Although it is clear that unaccented referring expressions are associated with given information in a discourse (Dahan et al., 2002), it is less clear what aspects of givenness are relevant. We examine whether listeners' expectation of givenness depends on repetition of a referring expression or on contextual evocation of a referent. The results from two visual world eye-tracking experiments suggest that for interpretation, listeners associated reduced prominence with a repeated referring expression. Listeners expect previously evoked referents to be candidates for reduced referring expressions only when they are referred to with the exact same referential form. The data also suggest that when referents are referred to with different referential forms across utterances, accenting facilitates linking those forms for co-reference.

This paper considers points in turn construction where conversation researchers have shown that talk routinely continues beyond possible turn completion, but where we find bodily-visual behavior doing such turn extension work. The bodily-visual behaviors we examine share many features with verbal turn extensions, but we argue that embodied movements have distinct properties that make them well-suited for specific kinds of social action, including stance display and by-play in sequences framed as subsidiary to a simultaneous and related verbal exchange. Our study is in line with a research agenda taking seriously the point made by Goodwin (2000a, b, 2003), Hayashi (2003, 2005), Iwasaki (2009), and others that scholars seeking to account for practices in language and social interaction do themselves a disservice if they privilege the verbal dimension; rather, as suggested in Stivers/Sidnell (2005), each semiotic system/modality, while coordinated with others, has its own organization. With the current exploration of bodily-visual turn extensions, we hope to contribute to a growing understanding of how these different modes of organization are managed concurrently and in concert by interactants in carrying out their everyday social actions.

In this study, adults, who were naïve to organic chemistry, drew stereoisomers of molecules and explained their drawings. From these explanations, we identified nine strategies that participants expressed during those explanations. Five of the nine strategies referred to properties of the molecule that were explanatorily to solving the problem; the remaining four referred to properties that were explanatorily to the solution. For each problem, we tallied which of the nine strategies were expressed within the explanation for that problem, and determined whether the strategy was expressed in speech only, gesture only, or in both speech and gesture within the explanation. After these explanations, all participants watched the experimenter deliver a two-minute training module on stereoisomers. Following the training, participants repeated the drawing+explanation task on six new problems. The number of relevant strategies that participants expressed in speech (alone or with gesture) before training did predict their post-training scores. However, the number of relevant strategies participants expressed before training predict their post-training scores. Conveying relevant information about stereoisomers uniquely in gesture prior to a brief training is thus a good index of who is most likely to learn from the training. We suggest that gesture reveals explanatorily relevant implicit knowledge that reflects (and perhaps even promotes) acquisition of new understanding.

Three self-paced reading experiments explored the processing of "only" and its interaction with context. In isolated sentences, the focus particle "only" predicts an upcoming contrast. Ambiguous replacive sentences (e.g., "The curator embarrassed the gallery owner in public, not the artist") with "only" on the subject or object showed faster reading of the contrast phrase ("not the artist") than without it. The position of "only" also influenced the phrase's meaning; despite a bias toward object contrasts, subject "only" increased subject interpretations. If preceding context provides another reason for the focus particle, it no longer predicts an upcoming contrast. In biasing contexts including indirect questions, there was no facilitation when "only" marked the argument which answered the question, while "only" on the other argument slowed processing. Both "only" and context influenced interpretation. The results show that focus particles and questions can each influence processing of an upcoming contrast on- and off-line.

In the current investigation, we used structural equation mediation modeling to examine the relations between executive function (indexed by measures of working memory, shifting, and inhibition), decoding ability, and reading comprehension in a sample of 298 6- to 8-year-old children ( =132 and 166 for boys and girls, respectively). Results for the full sample indicated that executive function was mediated by decoding ability. When sex was examined as a moderator of these associations, there was evidence for a trend suggesting that direct relations between executive function and reading comprehension were stronger for girls compared to boys; no significant differences were found for other direct and indirect relations. Taken together, these findings highlight the importance of executive function in supporting underlying integrative processes associated with reading comprehension and emphasize the need to further consider the role of executive function in relation to reading.

Google the question, "How is the Internet changing the way we communicate?," and you will find no shortage of opinions, or fears, about the Internet altering the way we communicate. Although the Internet is not necessarily making communication briefer (neither is the Internet making communication less formal), the Internet is manifesting our preference for writing over speaking. I propose that our preference for communicating through Internet-based text derives from a fundamental feature of writing: In contrast to speech, which is most often synchronous, text is most often asynchronous.

During conversation, speakers coordinate and synergize their behaviors at multiple levels, and in different ways. The extent to which individuals converge or diverge in their behaviors during interaction may relate to interpersonal differences relevant to social interaction, such as empathy as measured by the empathy quotient (EQ). An association between interpersonal difference in empathy and interpersonal entrainment could help to throw light on how interlocutor characteristics influence interpersonal entrainment. We investigated this possibility in a corpus of unconstrained conversation between dyads. We used dynamic time warping to quantify entrainment between interlocutors of head motion, hand motion, and maximum speech during question-response sequences. We additionally calculated interlocutor differences in EQ scores. We found that, for both head and hand motion, greater difference in EQ was associated with higher entrainment. Thus, we consider that people who are dissimilar in EQ may need to "ground" their interaction with low-level movement entrainment. There was no significant relationship between entrainment and EQ score differences.

In the current study, we examine how hearing parents use multimodal cuing to establish joint attention with their hearing (N=9) or deaf (N=9) children during a free-play session. The deaf children were all candidates for cochlear implantation who had not yet been implanted, and each hearing child was age-matched to a deaf child. We coded parents' use of auditory, visual, and tactile cues, alone and in different combinations, during both successful and failed bids for children's attention. Although our findings revealed no clear quantitative differences in parents' use of multimodal cues as a function of child hearing status, secondary analyses revealed that hearing parents of deaf children used shorter utterances while initiating joint attention than did hearing parents of hearing children. Hearing parents of deaf children also touched their children twice as often throughout the play session than did hearing parents of hearing children. These findings demonstrate that parents differentially accommodate the specific needs of their hearing and deaf children in subtle ways to establish communicative intent.

Reference production is often studied through single dimensions of contrast (e.g., "" when there are one or two glasses of varying height). Yet real-world communication is rarely so simple, raising questions about the factors guiding more complex referents. The current study examines decisions to mention set relations (e.g., using quantity-denoting expressions like "" to refer to 2-out-of-5 houses) versus object categories only (e.g., using bare plurals like ""). Two experiments used vignettes to vary discourse focus on objects (prominent vs. non-prominent) and scenes to vary the set type described (subset vs. total set). Speakers were more likely to communicate set relations of prominent objects, particularly when they elicited high name agreement in the case of total sets. Speakers' use of quantity-denoting expressions also increased listeners' sensitivity to set relations in an object-matching task. This suggests that unlike simpler forms of modification that often decrease with greater focus, quantity-denoting expressions provide additional information about the set relations of prominent referents.

It is generally assumed that prosodic cues that provide linguistic information, like discourse status, are driven primarily by the information structure of the conversation. This article investigates whether speakers have the capacity to adjust subtle acoustic-phonetic properties of the prosodic signal when they find themselves in contexts in which accurate communication is important. Thus, we examine whether the communicative context, in addition to discourse structure, modulates prosodic choices when speakers produce acoustic prominence. We manipulated the discourse status of target words in the context of a highly communicative task (i.e., working with a partner to solve puzzles in the computer game Minecraft) and in the context of a less communicative task more typical of psycholinguistic experiments (i.e., picture description). Speakers in the more communicative task produced prosodic cues to discourse structure that were more discriminable than those in the less communicative task. In a second experiment, we found that the presence or absence of a conversational partner drove some, but not all, of these effects. Together, these results suggest that speakers can modulate the prosodic signal in response to the communicative and social context.

Several studies have shown that narratives can influence readers' beliefs about themselves. In the present study, our goal was to investigate whether stories portraying a strong protagonist can positively influence recipients' beliefs of being in control of events in their own lives (self-related control beliefs). Experiment 1 showed that narratives in both written text and video form with protagonists displaying high versus low self-efficacy can, at least temporarily, affect recipients' own self-related control beliefs when they experience strong transportation into the stories. In addition, the results suggest that recipients' perceived ability to generate vivid mental imagery affects their transportation into and identification with characters in texts versus films. Experiment 2 manipulated transportation and identification experimentally and showed that the effect of this manipulation on self-related control beliefs was indeed mediated by experienced transportation and identification. The results are discussed within the framework of the Transportation Imagery Model of narrative persuasion.

Semantic memory is relatively stable across the lifespan (Rönnlund, Nyberg, & Bäckman, 2005; Spaniol, Madden, & Voss, 2006); however, most research has been conducted at the single concept level. Few researchers have examined how semantic knowledge is used in discourse. The purpose of the study, then, was to determine the proportion of semantic knowledge and category domains used in discourse produced by younger and older participants. Cognitively healthy, younger (n=30, 20-39) and older (n=30; 60-89) participants told stories that were transcribed and coded for 10 domains of semantic knowledge and also and . Results indicated group differences for the proportion of semantic knowledge type, , and for the category type, living things. These findings extend previous research on semantic features into the realm of discourse and indicate the importance of studying semantic features and categories within discourse.

Much of the research on discourse marking has focused on written text, thereby not considering signals available in the multimodal domain. It is therefore an open question to what extent comprehenders rely on nonlexical discourse signals, such as gestural discourse markers. We conducted a multimodal continuation study: 48 participants were presented with videos of a speaker narrating short stories including a contrast, a list, or an exception relation. In one condition, the target discourse relation was accompanied by a gestural discourse marker; in another condition it was not. The sound was cut out at the second relational argument, and participants were asked to provide a likely continuation. The results showed that comprehenders can infer discourse meaning from gestures, but gestural signals are not as strong as lexical connectives have been found to be. These findings contribute to our understanding of how people can achieve successful comprehension in multimodal communication.