Narrative Comprehension

Narrative Comprehension

Author: Catherine Emmott

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 9780198236498

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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

Published: 1993-01-01

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 9027222177

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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

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 0805815341

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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

Published: 2003-05-21

Total Pages: 579

ISBN-13: 0080491413

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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

Published: 2013-12-16

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 113587493X

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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

Published: 1983-01-01

Total Pages: 498

ISBN-13: 9027280258

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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

Published: 2018-04-15

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 9027264309

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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.


Children's Comprehension Problems in Oral and Written Language

Children's Comprehension Problems in Oral and Written Language

Author: Kate Cain

Publisher: Guilford Press

Published: 2008-05-07

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1593858329

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Comprehension is the ultimate aim of reading and listening. How do children develop the ability to comprehend written and spoken language, and what can be done to help those who are having difficulties? This book presents cutting-edge research on comprehension problems experienced by children without any formal diagnosis as well as those with specific language impairment, autism, ADHD, learning disabilities, hearing impairment, head injuries, and spina bifida. Providing in-depth information to guide research and practice, chapters describe innovative assessment strategies and identify important implications for intervention and classroom instruction. The book also sheds light on typical development and the key cognitive skills and processes that underlie successful comprehension.


Language Structure, Discourse, and the Access to Consciousness

Language Structure, Discourse, and the Access to Consciousness

Author: Maksim Stamenov

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1997-01-01

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 9027251320

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The focus of this collective volume is on the mutual determination of language structure, discourse patterns and the accessibility to consciousness of mental contents of different types of organization and complexity. The contributions address the following problems, among others: the history of the interpretation of conscious and unconscious mind in the theoretical discourse of modern linguistics; the determination of the structure of consciousness by the grammatical structure; the levels of access of grammatical and lexical information to consciousness; the development of cognitive complexity and control in ontogeny; pathologies of consciousness access in discourse comprehension and production; the cognitive contextual prerequisites for the representation of meaning in consciousness; the relationships between language structure and qualia in the phenomenology of experience; the dialogical structure of intentionality and meaning representation, etc. (Series B)