Debra L. Long

Working memory and Stroop interference: An individual differences investigation

We investigated the claim that individual differences in working-memory capacity reflect limitations on the ability to inhibit task-irrelevant information and/or to maintain activation in the face of distracting or interfering events. Specifically, we investigated whether high- and low-capacity individuals differed in their susceptibility to interference on the Stroop task and whether high-capacity individuals employed a strategy for minimizing Stroop interference. In Experiment 1, we found that high-capacity participants showed substantial interference when conflict trials were infrequent, but almost no interference when conflict trials were frequent. In contrast, low-capacity participants showed substantial interference irrespective of the proportion of conflict trials. In Experiment 2, we found that high-capacity participants experienced substantial negative priming, slow responses when the to-be-named color was the irrelevant word on the previous trial. We discuss these results and their implications for highcapacity individuals’ ability to reduce Stroop interference in light of both inhibitory and noninhibitory accounts of negative priming.

Wit and humor in discourse processing

Humor and wit are complex cognitive, social, and linguistic phenomena that are relevant to research in text comprehension, pragmatics, and discourse processing. We begin by presenting a taxonomy of jokes and wit as a useful, descriptive tool. Next, we argue that humor processing may occur in a parallel rather than serial fashion by contrasting a serial‐processing, incongruity‐resolution model with an alternative dual‐processing model. We subsequently endorse a theory of speech acts as a theoretical framework for the consideration of wit in discourse processing. Specifically, we argue that detailed analytical theories such as Allens (1983) are needed to clarify the semantic and computational foundations of humor and wit. We present a taxonomy of the social functions of wit and argue that the consideration of wit as a plan for the fulfillment of social and discourse goals will enrich our theories of conversation.

Superordinate goal inferences: Are they automatically generated during comprehension?

Long, Golding, and Graesser (1992) and Long, Golding, Graesser, and Clark (1990) have reported evidence that readers spontaneously generate superordinate goal inferences as they read action statements in stories when they have sufficient time to do so (i.e., a long delay between presentation of the inference‐eliciting sentence and the test probe). The purpose of the present study was to determine whether readers generate these inferences under relatively demanding time constraints. We used a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) procedure, a 250‐ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), and a lexical decision task to test the prediction that superordinate goal inferences are more likely to be automatically generated during comprehension than are subordinate goal inferences. In addition, we had subjects answer simple comprehension questions in order to assess their memory for episodes in the stories. The data indicated that subjects who scored well on the comprehension test exhibited a pattern of decision late...

A test of the on-line status of goal-related inferences

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the on-line status of goal-related inferences. We combined a question-answering procedure and on-line measures of inference generation to test the prediction that superordinate goal inferences have a higher likelihood of being generated on-line during comprehension than do subordinate goal inferences. In Experiment 1, a lexical decision task revealed that superordinate goal inferences were encoded on-line as part of the readers text representation even though these inferences were not true “bridging” inferences. In Experiment 2, we replicated this outcome in a word naming task. In Experiment 3, we established that the findings were not due to semantic associations between the target words and the lexical items in the text. The pattern of results was consistent with a global-coherence model of inference generation in which the reader generates causal connections that link each episode in a text from beginning to end.

Thinking aloud: Telling a story about a story

In this commentary, we provide a rationale for the use of verbal protocols in the study of discourse processing. We argue that readers do not provide a veridical report of their underlying mental processes when they “think aloud” during text comprehension. Rather, they construct a text representation and then use it to “tell a story” about their understanding. This story reveals important information about the processes involved in text comprehension as well as those involved in constructing a message to be understood in a context shared by the speaker and listener. We describe how this view leads to interesting hypotheses about (a) inferential processing during comprehension, (b) individual differences in comprehension performance, and (c) the processes involved in conversational discourse and storytelling.

The importance of knowledge in vivid text memory: An individual-differences investigation of recollection and familiarity

The goal of this study was to examine how individual variation in readers’ skills and, in particular, their background knowledge about a text are related to text memory. Recollection and familiarity estimates were obtained from remember and know judgments to text ideas. Recollection estimates to old items were predicted by readers’ background knowledge, but not by other comprehension-related factors, such as word-decoding skill and working memory capacity. False alarms involving recollection of new items (inferences) were diminished as a function of verbal ability, working memory capacity, and reasoning but increased as a function of background knowledge. The results suggest that recollection indexes the reader’s ability to construct a text representation in which text ideas are integrated with relevant domain knowledge. Moreover, these results highlight the importance of background knowledge in explaining individual variation in comprehension and memory for text.

What are the cognitive and conceptual components of humorous text

Abstract The goal of this project was to identify the cognitive mechanisms and conceptual features that underlie humorous text. Given that there have been very few attempts to understand humor in the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science, this project is very much at an exploratory stage, both theoretically and empirically. We begin by identifying the primary theoretical foundations that guide our investigations of text comprehension in general (e.g., contextualism, constructivism). We subsequently summarize the major theories of humor in psychology and linguistics (including both jokes and wit). Having established this theoretical background, we report two exploratory studies that were designed to identify and to assess components of humorous text. In study 1, we collected verbal protocols from college students in an effort to identify humorous components of punchlines. The students were asked to generate punchlines to jokes and to answer questions about the generated punchlines (e.g., ‘Why is this joke funny?’, ‘Why would a speaker tell this joke?’). In study 2, college students rated jokes on a 6-point funniness scale. Multiple regression analyses assessed whether these funniness ratings could be predicted by several variables that corresponded to the hypothesized components of humorous text (e.g., theme, target disparagement, surprisingness, and clever communicative devices).

Goal, Event, and State Inferences: An Investigation of Inference Generation During Story Comprehension

Publisher Summary Recently, there has been a considerable interest in identifying knowledge-based inferences that are generated during story comprehension. Some types of inferences are generated as readers comprehend a passage, whereas other types of inferences are generated after comprehension Graesser and Clark (1985) have developed a model of narrative comprehension that makes specific predictions about the types of inferences that are generated during short story comprehension. Knowledge-based inferences include states, events, actions, and goals that are associated with relevant generic knowledge structures A number of comprehension models have addressed the notion that activation from multiple information sources enhances inference generation. Referential bridging inferences include (1) inferences specifying that the same word across two propositions refers to the same concept and (2) inferences specifying that an anaphor and its antecedent refer to the same concept. Equally important for a coherent text representation are causal bridging inferences. Causal bridging inferences establish a causal connection between the current sentence and the preceding text.

The Strategic Nature of Less Skilled Readers' Suppression Problems.

This study was conducted to investigate the nature of cognitive inhibition as it operates in the comprehension of language. Previous research has shown that the ability to inhibit or suppress irrelevant information underlies individual differences in reading skill. Less skilled readers appear to have difficulty suppressing active, but irrelevant, information during comprehension. Two different accounts of less skilled readers’ suppression problems were investigated. First, less skilled readers may have deficiencies in an automatic suppression mechanism. Alternatively, they may have difficulty executing a strategic process necessary to overcome response conflict. The results of three experiments supported the latter hypothesis. Less skilled readers were prone to interference only when a test probe had an ambiguous relation to a preceding context and a task required or was susceptible to context checking at test.

Individual differences in syntactic ambiguity resolution: readers vary in their use of plausibility information.

Two experiments investigated the relation between individual differences in working memory capacity and differences in the efficiency of syntactic processing. In one experiment, readers comprehended sentences containing main-verb/reduced-relative ambiguities that all resolved to the reduced-relative interpretation. High-span (but not low-span) readers processed sentences more slowly when the sentences were biased to the preferred, main-verb interpretation than when they were biased to the reduced-relative interpretation. Moreover, high-span (but not lowspan) readers used information about the plausibility of the different interpretations even though low-span readers appeared to possess the requisite knowledge. In Experiment 2, readers received intensive exposure to sentences with main-verb/reduced-relative ambiguities. Exposure enhanced low-span readers’ use of plausibility information. Moreover, the effect of exposure generalized to sentences that were not included in the training materials.