T from and this A And Univ ralu propositional representation. In addition, if possible for each sentence, pointers are added to a long-term memory referent which reflects past experience with the situation described in the sentence. This system accounts for basic results in sentence memory without assuming different retention functions for surface, propositional, or situational information. The...

How do individuals remember feedback that is inconsistent or negative? According to the inconsistency-negativity resolution model, individuals are motivated to reduce uncertainty and resolve inconsistency even when threat to self is potential. They more deeply process and better remember negative self- than other-referent information. According to the inconsistency-negativity neglect model, ind...

This study compares homonym learning to novel word learning by three- to four-year-old children to determine whether homonyms are learned more rapidly or more slowly than novel words. In addition, the role of form characteristics in homonym learning is examined by manipulating phonotactic probability and word frequency. Thirty-two children were exposed to homonyms and novel words in a story wit...

Theories (and experiments) on decision making under risk typically ignore (and exclude) a social context. We explore whether this omission is detrimental. To do so we experimentally investigate the simplest possible situation with both social comparison and risk: participants choose between two lotteries while a referent faces a fixed payoff. Participants are more risk averse when they can earn...

In this paper I consider the role of demonstrative determiners in a relevance theorybased account of referring expressions. I argue that ‘this’ and ‘that’ encode procedural information relating to the relative proximity of the intended referent. In certain cases, this procedural information will contribute to reference resolution by either ruling out other potential referents or making the inte...

Children tend to choose an unfamiliar object rather than a familiar one when asked to find the referent of a novel name. This response has been taken as evidence for the operation of certain lexical constraints in children's inferences of word meanings. The present studies test an alternative--pragmatic--explanation of this phenomenon among 3-year-olds. In Study 1 children responded to a reques...

Kehler and Rohde (2013) proposed a Bayesian theory of pronoun interpretation where the influence of world knowledge emerges as effects on the prior and the influence of information structure as effects on the likelihood: P(referent|pronoun) μ P(pronoun|referent)P(referent). Here we present two experiments on Mandarin Chinese that allow us to test the generality of the theory for a language with...

BACKGROUND Previous research indicates that individuals with seasonal depression (SD) do not exhibit the memory biases for negative self-referent information that characterize non-seasonal depression (NSD). The current study extended this work by examining processing of self-referent emotional information concerning potential future events in SD. METHOD SD and NSD patients, along with never-d...

Two eyetracking-during-listening experiments showed frequency and context effects on fixation probability for pictures representing multiple meanings of homophones. Participants heard either an imperative sentence instructing them to look at a homophone referent (Experiment 1) or a declarative sentence that was either neutral or biased toward the homophone's subordinate meaning (Experiment 2). ...

We examine demonstrative pronouns in a portion of the Santa Barbara Corpus of American English and propose a coding scheme that classifies pronouns with nominal as well as non-nominal antecedents into direct and indirect, depending on whether their referent is the same as the referent/denotation of the antecedent. In agreement with previous studies, we find that demonstratives more often have n...