Anthony J. Sanford

Perceiving affect from arm movement

We examined the visual perception of affect from point-light displays of arm movements. Two actors were instructed to perform drinking and knocking movements with ten different affects while the three-dimensional positions of their arms were recorded. Point-light animations of these natural movements and phase-scrambled, upside-down versions of the same knocking movements were shown to participants who were asked to categorize the affect of the display. In both cases the resulting confusion matrices were analyzed using multidimensional scaling. For the natural movements the resulting two-dimensional psychological space was similar to a circumplex with the first dimension appearing as activation and the second dimension as pleasantness. For the scrambled displays the first dimension was similar in structure to that obtained for the natural movements but the second dimension was not. With both natural and scrambled movements Dimension 1 of the psychological space was highly correlated to the kinematics of the movement. These results suggest that the corresponding activation of perceived affect is a formless cue that relates directly to the movement kinematics while the pleasantness of the movement appears to be carried in the phase relations between the different limb segments.

Depth of processing in language comprehension: not noticing the evidence

The study of processes underlying the interpretation of language often produces evidence that they are complete and occur incrementally. However, computational linguistics has shown that interpretations are often effective even if they are underspecified. We present evidence that similar underspecified representations are used by humans during comprehension, drawing on a scattered and varied literature. We also show how linguistic properties of focus, subordination and focalization can control depth of processing, leading to underspecified representations. Modulation of degrees of specification might provide a way forward in the development of models of the processing underlying language understanding.

The accessibility of pronominal antecedents as a function of episode shifts in narrative text

One of the characteristics of connected discourse is that entities introduced are often referred to again at a later point. Such anaphoric reference clearly necessitates a memory representation of the prior text, so that the new reference can be established as coreferential with the old. In this paper, a distinction is made between people introduced in a narrative who depend upon a particular setting in order to be interpreted (scenario-dependent entities), and those who do not (main characters). It is argued that the availability of representations of these two types of character in working memory will depend upon whether the text indicates a change in setting to have occurred. Two experiments are described which show that dependent entities become less available if a change has occurred, while main characters are not so affected. The first study uses incidence of mention in a passage continuation procedure as an index of availability, while the second uses reading time and question-answering latencies. The experiments rule out any simple view that availability depends only upon how far back in the text a character was mentioned, and illustrate how passage of time in a narrative serves as a cue for recognizing the end of an episode.

Interpreting Anaphoric Relations: The Integration of Semantic Information while Reading.

To understand fully the pair of sentences “A bus came roaring round the corner; The vehicle narrowly missed a pedestrian,” the reader has to deduce that the vehicle in question is a bus which came roaring round the corner. In Experiment 1 we show that the reading time for the second sentence in such a pair is in part determined by the semantic distance between the two items to be integrated (vehicle and bus in this case). This result suggests that the information from the two sentences is integrated at the time of reading. Experiment 2 replicates the semantic distance effect in a situation where the two sentences are separated in the text. In Experiment-3 and 4 it is shown that the effect can be abolished under conditions where the two items appear in unrelated phrases. On the basis of these results a model of textual comprehension is proposed.

The role of scenario mapping in text comprehension

We argue that different theories of text comprehension give the use of world knowledge different degrees of importance. Although all acknowledge it as a major feature of comprehension, just when and how it is utilized appears to split theories into those that are based on propositions as building blocks and those that are not. We argue for an account that does not rely on the proposition as an early building block, the scenario‐mapping and focus account, based on Sanford and Garrods (1981) earlier work. We argue that interpretation at a pre‐ and subpropositional level is both an empirical fact and a theoretical necessity and that the primary task of the language processor is to map language input at a (largely) subpropositional level onto background knowledge. We illustrate the utility of the approach with a discussion of the representation of plurals and quantified statements. Although some of our claims are consistent with both the construction‐integration account and minimalism, we argue that the core...

A case study of anomaly detection : shallow semantic processing and cohesion establishment

Although the establishment of a coherent mental representation depends on semantic analysis, such analysis is not necessarily complete. This is illustrated by failures to notice the anomaly in questions such as, “When an airplane crashes, where should the survivors be buried?” Four experiments were carried out to extend knowledge of what determines the incidental detection of the critical item. Detection is a function of the goodness of global fit of the item (Experiments 1 and 2) and the extent to which the scenario predicts the item (Experiment 3). Global good fit appears to result in shallow processing of details. In Experiment 4, it is shown that if satisfactory coherence can be established without detailed semantic analysis, through the recruitment of suitable information from a sentence, then processing is indeed shallow. The studies also show that a text is not understood by first producing a local semantic representation and then incorporating this into a global model, and that semantic processing is not strictly incremental.

Linguistic focus and good-enough representations: An application of the change-detection paradigm

A number of lines of study suggest that word meanings are not always fully exploited in comprehension. In two experiments, we used a text-change paradigm to study depth of semantic processing during reading. Participants were instructed to detect words that changed across two consecutive presentations of short texts. The results suggest that the full details of word meanings are not always incorporated into the interpretation and that the degree of semantic detail in the representation is a function of linguistic focus. The results provide evidence for the idea that representations are only good enough for the purpose at hand (Ferreira, Bailey, & Ferraro, 2002).

What, when, and how?: Questions of immediacy in anaphoric reference resolution

Abstract This paper considers the question of the immediacy of interpretation of anaphors. Two aspects of immediacy are considered: (1) immediacy in terms of the initiation of processes that might be considered as supporting resolution, and (2) immediacy in terms of achieving resolution as an outcome. The functional justification, and the logic of these aspects are considered. The bulk of the paper is a review of pertinent experimental evidence. On the basis of studies both on speech and reading comprehension, we argue that the evidence favours immediate initiation. However, it is argued that immediacy of outcome must take into account the variety of different forms of definite anaphora: proper names, full definite descriptions, and pronouns. Whereas there is good evidence for early resolution in the case of the first two, it does not hold for all cases of pronominal anaphora. Furthermore, evidence from a variety of stylistic phenomena indicate the need to disentangle carefully the semantic constraints in...

Communicating quantities: a review of psycholinguistic evidence of how expressions determine perspectives

The way in which information about proportions, amounts, frequencies, probabilities, degrees of confidence, and risk is portrayed in natural language is not neutral, but reflects presuppositions and assumed norms. In this paper we present a review of evidence in support of this position. We show that the choice of expressions for communication depends in a systematic way on the kinds of inferences communicators draw. We go on to discuss the consequences of this for attribution phenomena, aspects of reasoning, the portrayal of uncertainty, and responses to questionnaires. We also suggest that communicator preferences for using language rather than numbers may have to do with human reasoning being argument-based, rather than with a preference for vagueness, as has been commonly claimed.

Proper Names as Controllers of Discourse Focus

An important aspect of the psychological focus of character-based discourse is the character that is the most prominent at any given point during reading, since prominent characters can control a number of processes leading to the cohesiveness of text. In this paper, three experiments are reported which investigate the proposition that the use of a proper name for a character (e.g., Louise) makes that character more prominent than does a role description (e.g., The hairdresser), even when the description denotes the same individual, playing the same narrative role. The studies show that named characters are more likely to be used in continuations of stories (referential availability), and that sentences containing pronominal anaphoric references to named characters are read more rapidly than those referring to corresponding role descriptions (referential accessibility). Naming thus appears to be a major factor in focus control. Some explanations and implications are discussed.