The interaction between textual structures and prior knowledge: Hypotheses, data and simulations

International audienceOur purpose was to compare the effect of two types of textual semantic coherence - causal and teleological - oil the organization of the mental representation elaborated after reading by learners with different levels of prior knowledge. Beginners, Intermediates and Advanced in computer domain read either the causal or the teleological version of a text describing three functions of a text editor, then performed a cued recall and a recognition task. We assumed that Advanced learners build a mental representation of the domain organized in a hierarchical goal/sub-goals structure, whereas Beginners and Intermediates have a mental representation organized in a causal path. If this is so, the results should indicate a significant interaction between prior knowledge and the semantic coherence of the texts: for the Advanced learners, recall and recognition of the teleological text should be better, whereas for the Beginners and Intermediates, the reverse was expected. As we assumed, results indicated that a teleological organization of textual information facilitated the comprehension of Advanced participants while a temporal-causal organization facilitated the comprehension of Beginner and Intermediate participants. The Construction-Integration model of Kintsch (1988, 1998) was used to simulate the recall results and to reproduce the effect of prior knowledge on the retrieval of textual information

Lexical context effect on meaning access of homographs

International audienceWe present three lexical decision experiments investigating the effect of lexical context on homophonic homographs meaning access. In the two first experiments, each trial consisted of the presentation of a context word, an ambiguous word as a prime, and a target word. The context word was related either to the dominant or subordinate meaning, or was not related. The target word was related to the dominant meaning of the ambiguous word in Experiment 1, and to the subordinate meaning in Experiment 2. The presentation time of words and the ISI were also manipulated. The results indicated an early effect of the context on meaning access : whereas the presentation of a context word related to the same meaning as the target word resulted in a facilitation of reaction times, a context word related to a different meaning did not produce an inhibition effect on target processing time. Moreover, this pattern of results was obtained whatever the relative frequency of the meaning related to the target word. A third experiment was conducted in order to test the possibility of a direct priming effect between the context and the target words related to the same meaning. Our results are discussed with regard to the hypothesis of competition between the different meanings of homographs

Free association norms and meaning frequencies for 162 ambiguous words

International audienceHomonyms are ambiguous words having several unrelated meanings (for example, bank). They are widely used in language research to study, among others, general language processing, ambiguity resolution, and lexical and meaning representations in memory. Typical priming studies require controlling associative relationships between prime and target words. Moreover, specific to the homonyms is the control of the frequency of their meanings. The main goal of these first published free association norms for French homograph homophones is to permit such controls. Each of the 162 ambiguous words was presented to 100 French native speakers. All responses are presented and we provide meaning frequencies and word ambiguity measures estimated from these norms

The interaction between textual structures and prior knowledge: Hypotheses, data and simulations

International audienceOur purpose was to compare the effect of two types of textual semantic coherence - causal and teleological - oil the organization of the mental representation elaborated after reading by learners with different levels of prior knowledge. Beginners, Intermediates and Advanced in computer domain read either the causal or the teleological version of a text describing three functions of a text editor, then performed a cued recall and a recognition task. We assumed that Advanced learners build a mental representation of the domain organized in a hierarchical goal/sub-goals structure, whereas Beginners and Intermediates have a mental representation organized in a causal path. If this is so, the results should indicate a significant interaction between prior knowledge and the semantic coherence of the texts: for the Advanced learners, recall and recognition of the teleological text should be better, whereas for the Beginners and Intermediates, the reverse was expected. As we assumed, results indicated that a teleological organization of textual information facilitated the comprehension of Advanced participants while a temporal-causal organization facilitated the comprehension of Beginner and Intermediate participants. The Construction-Integration model of Kintsch (1988, 1998) was used to simulate the recall results and to reproduce the effect of prior knowledge on the retrieval of textual information

Free association norms and meaning frequencies for 162 ambiguous words

International audienceHomonyms are ambiguous words having several unrelated meanings (for example, bank). They are widely used in language research to study, among others, general language processing, ambiguity resolution, and lexical and meaning representations in memory. Typical priming studies require controlling associative relationships between prime and target words. Moreover, specific to the homonyms is the control of the frequency of their meanings. The main goal of these first published free association norms for French homograph homophones is to permit such controls. Each of the 162 ambiguous words was presented to 100 French native speakers. All responses are presented and we provide meaning frequencies and word ambiguity measures estimated from these norms