《语言心理学》ppt课件

Chapter 7 Discourse Comprehension and Memory,Supervisor: Zhang Zhimin Reporter: Lang Qian,Contents,Introduction,Comprehension of Discourse,Memory for Discourse,Schemata and Discourse Processing,Educational Implications,Introduction,This chapter deals with the ways we comprehend and remember units of language longer than the sentencethat is, connected discourse. Research on discourse has grown significantly in recent decades, for several reasons. We rarely speak in isolated sentence, discourse seems to be a more natural unit of language to investigate. Sentences are ambiguous or obscure apart from their discourse context. Discourse provides a rich source of material for those interested in the cognitive processes used in language.,Comprehension of discourse,Title,Local and global discourse structure,Strategies used to establish coherence,Cohesion,Summary,Role of working memory,Local and global discourse structure,Comprehension of connected discourse depends less on the meaning of the individual sentences than on their arrange-ment. Indeed, it is entirely possible for a group of mean-ingful sentences to be thrown together in a way that makes no sense at all. e.g. Carlos arranged to take golf lessons from the local pro-fessional. His dog, a cocker spaniel, was expecting pups again. Andrea had the car washed for the big wedding. She expected Carlos to help her move into her new apartment.,Local and global discourse structure,John bought a cake at the bake shop. The cake was chocolate with white frosting and it was read “Happy birthday, Joan” in red letters. John was particularly pleased with the lettering. He brought it over to Gregs house, and together they worked on the rest of details. John bought a cake at the bake shop. The birthday card was signed by all of the employees. The party went on until after midnight.,Local and global discourse structure,The contrast between the last two passages illustrates an important point that we must look beneath the surface to understand discourse structure. Superficially, the last passage is incomplete, but the overall result in readers minds may be quite complete. The three passages discussed illustrate two levels of dis- course structure. Local structure: in the relationships between individual sentences in the discourse. Global structure: it is our knowledge of the structure corresponding to the topic that enables us to comprehend and remember the shorter passage about the topic.,Cohesion,At the local level, a discourse is coherent if there are semantic relationships between successive sentences. Halliday and Hason define cohesion as referring to “the range of possibilities that exist for linking something with what has gone before”. 1. Categories of cohesion 2. Anaphoric and cataphoric reference,Categories of cohesion,Pronominal Demonstrative Comparative Substitution Ellipsis,Conjunction Lexical Reiteration Synonym Hyponym,Anaphoric and cataphoric reference,Cohesion consists of relating some current expression to one encountered earlier. This is called anaphoric refer-ence. When we use an expression to refer back to some-thing previously mentioned in discourse, the referring expression is called an anaphor, and the previous refer-ent is called an antecedent. One of these forms of cohesion anaphoric reference has commanded the great interest among psychologists. There are two reasons in it. One reason is that anaphoric reference enables us to explore the role of working memory in discourse com-prehension. The other reason is that anaphoric reference illuminates the role of communicative conventions in discourse.,Strategies used to establish coherence,Given information It refers to information that an author or speaker assumes the reader or listener already knows, whereas new infor-mation is information that the comprehender is assumed to not know. e.g. It was Steve who robbed the bank. It was the bank that Steve robbed.,Strategies used to establish coherence,Given / New strategy Clark and Haviland suggest that readers expect authors to use given information to refer to information the readers already know or can identify and to use new information to refer to concepts with which they are not already familiar. Three stages about this strategy 1) Identifying the given and new information in the current sentence. 2) Finding an antecedent in memory for the given information 3) attaching the new information to this spot in memory.,Strategies used to establish coherence,Directing matching The simplest case is surely study that in which the given information in the target sentence directly matches an antecedent in the context sentence. And in comprehending the target sentence, we first divide it into given and new information. Even though direct matches are the simple case of sentence relations, they are not so simple that they can be reduced to merely searching for a specific word. Find an antecedent for given information in a