Listening and reading comprehension are complex processes that are difficult to assess. Many standardized comprehension tests place high demands on memory, assess only sentence length material, and may not reflect how students comprehend classroom material. The present study employed a sentence verification task ( S m ) to test 60 grade 7 and 8 students' comprehension of expository passages. Pa...

ion. Interestingly, there was an advantage during testing when participants learned specific facts. Previous research on sentence comprehension shows that after a sentence has been interpreted, the original form of the sentence is not important for remembering the meaning of that sentence (Sachs, 1967). Semantic abstractions from a specific sentence can be applied to the

Research on embodied approaches to language comprehension suggests that we understand linguistic descriptions of actions by mentally simulating these actions. Evidence is provided by the action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE) which shows that sensibility judgments for sentences are faster when the direction of the described action matches the response direction. In two experiments, we inves...

Two experiments investigate the effects of language comprehension on affordances. Participants read a sentence composed by either an observation or an action verb (Look at/Grasp) followed by an object name. They had to decide whether the visual object following the sentence was the same as the one mentioned in the sentence. Objects graspable with either a precision or a power grip were presente...

Just as syntax differentiates coherent sentences from scrambled word strings, the comprehension of sequential images must also use a cognitive system to distinguish coherent narrative sequences from random strings of images. We conducted experiments analogous to two classic studies of language processing to examine the contributions of narrative structure and semantic relatedness to processing ...

The determining of brain regions that exhibit specific activity during sentence comprehension compared to other non-linguistic cognitive tasks constitutes one of the important challenges in the domain of functional neuroimaging of the faculty of language. In the current paper we report an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (ER-fMRI) experiment, in which we directly compared the...

The current study investigated Korean passive sentence comprehension deficits in aphasia and its underlying processing mechanisms using three types of syntactic structures: 1) active sentences with a 2-argument structure, 2) active sentences with a 3-argument structure, and 3) passive counterparts of active sentences with a 2-argument structure. Persons with aphasia showed differentially greate...

In this paper we propose a cognitive model that simulates the acquisition of object pronouns. The model will be implemented to generate precise and testable predictions about the comprehension and production of object pronouns. During sentence processing, the model incrementally builds a structural representation of the sentence, and the model incrementally constructs a discourse representation...

When reading a narrative, comprehension and retention of information benefit considerably from the use of situation models--coherent representations of the characters, locations, and activities described in the text. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore the neural mechanisms supporting situation model processing. Participants read blocks of sentences that were ei...