Steven L. Greenspan

Updating situation models during narrative comprehension

Abstract The present study examines whether readers of narratives focus on information relevant to the protagonists perspective even when this information is implied rather than explicitly stated in the narrative. It also examines whether the protagonists perspective is associated with this characters mental as well as physical location. We investigated these issues by conducting experiments in which subjects memorized a building layout and then read narratives that described a protagonist moving through the building while following a plan. Accessibility of object locations during reading was probed by interrupting the narrative and presenting the names of two objects from the building. Subjects indicated whether the objects were from the same room or from different rooms of the building. Experiment 1 investigated accessibility immediately after sentences that described the character moving from one room into another via a known but unmentioned path room. Readers answered questions about objects at the protagonists current location (the goal room) more quickly than questions about objects in other rooms. Importantly, objects in the unmentioned path room were more accessible than those in mentioned but less relevant rooms. This finding shows that readers focus on information that is relevant to the protagonist by implication even if it is not mentioned. Experiments 2 and 3 show that the inferencing found in the first experiment depended more on the situational relevance of the implicit information than on other properties of the narratives or on the probe task. Experiment 2 also showed that the protagonists location was less accessible than another location that the protagonist was thinking about. Thus, readers focused on the protagonists “mental location” more than the physical location. Experiment 3 showed that the location room remained accessible so long as it was relevant to the protagonists actions. Thus, the dynamics of accessibility during comprehension reflects the relevance of information to the current actions of the protagonist.

Situation-Based Inferences During Narrative Comprehension

Publisher Summary This chapter describes situation-based inferences that readers make during narrative comprehension and the distinction between text-based inferences and situation-based inferences. Text-based inferences are backward directed in the sense that readers apparently do not draw these inferences at the time they are invited by a sentence; but the inferences are only drawn later when they are required to connect together subsequent sentences into a coherent text base . Situation-based inferences differ from text-based inferences in at least two ways. First, in addition to aiding text coherence, situation-based inferences are used to understand the writers intended situations. That is, readers are likely to use background knowledge whenever they assume the writer intended them to use this knowledge to understand the situations. In other words, background knowledge is used as a first rather than a last resort when it is a salient part of the common ground between reader and writer. Second, situation-based inferences are directed forward rather than backward, because readers tend to draw them as these inferences are implied as relevant to the described situations rather than later as they become necessary for coherence. The chapter discusses three experiments that underline the importance of situation-based inferences for understanding narratives.

A study of two standard speech intelligibility measures

In the diagnostic rhyme test (DRT) participants identify each test word by chosing one of two response alternatives that differ only in their initial consonants and only by a single binary distinctive feature. Although the DRT is an accepted industry and military standard for measuring initial consonant intelligibility, other intelligibility measures may be more appropriate when stimuli produce near maximum DRT scores. Moreover, the DRT incorporates assumptions that may be valid for natural speech, but are untested for high‐quality, low‐bit rate coded speech. In particular, the DRT implicitly assumes that segmental intelligibility can be adequately measured by examining only single feature confusions. To examine this assumption, subjects were asked to identify the initial consonants of consonant‐vowel syllables. Multifeature confusions were far more common with coded speech than with natural speech. Moreover, the consonant identification procedure reliably discriminated between speech coding devices that ...