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Related Experiment Videos

Mechanisms that improve referential access.

M A Gernsbacher

    Cognition
    |July 1, 1989
    PubMed
    Summary
    This summary is machine-generated.

    Referential access is improved by enhancement and suppression mechanisms. Explicit anaphors boost antecedent activation and suppress others, while pronouns primarily suppress, with explicitness influencing effectiveness.

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    Area of Science:

    • Cognitive Psychology
    • Psycholinguistics
    • Computational Linguistics

    Background:

    • Referential access, the process of retrieving concepts in discourse, is crucial for comprehension.
    • Two proposed mechanisms, enhancement and suppression, modulate concept activation to facilitate this process.
    • Anaphors, like pronouns and repeated names, are hypothesized to trigger these mechanisms based on their informational content.

    Purpose of the Study:

    • To investigate the roles of suppression and enhancement in referential access.
    • To examine how the explicitness of anaphoric reference influences these mechanisms.
    • To determine if these mechanisms apply to both rementioned and newly introduced concepts.

    Main Methods:

    • Six experiments were conducted using a probe verification task to measure concept activation levels.

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  • Participants read sentences with two introduced participants, followed by anaphoric references (explicit names vs. pronouns).
  • Anaphor explicitness and timing of antecedent information were manipulated.

    • Main Results:

    • Explicit, repeated name anaphors immediately enhanced their antecedents and suppressed non-antecedents.
    • Pronoun anaphors suppressed non-antecedents, but with a delay, even when antecedent information preceded the pronoun.
    • More explicit pronouns and newly introduced concepts also triggered suppression, demonstrating its broader applicability.

    Conclusions:

    • Both enhancement and suppression contribute to improving referential access.
    • The effectiveness of these mechanisms is directly related to the explicitness of the anaphoric reference.
    • These findings provide insights into the dynamic activation processes underlying language comprehension.