Syntactic processing in high- and low-skill comprehenders working under normal and stressful conditions

The degree to which syntactic and discourse comprehension rely on common or disparate processing systems is a matter of continuing debate in psycholinguistics, particularly in aphasia research. The present study examines possible relationships between discourse comprehension and auditory syntactic comprehension assessed under normal listening, single, and dual "stress" conditions. Results showed that stress can dramatically exaggerate differences in syntactic difficulty and that general discourse comprehension skill can significantly predict syntactic comprehension profiles. We discuss the results with reference to competing models of language development, comprehension, and breakdown

Managing mental representations during narrative comprehension

Three experiments investigated how readers manage their mental representations during narrative comprehension. The first experiment investigated whether readers’ access to their mental representations of the main character in a narrative becomes enhanced (producing a “benefit”) when the character is rementioned; the first experiment also investigated whether readers’ access to the main character in a narrative becomes weakened or interfered with (producing a “cost”) when a new character is introduced. The purpose of the second experiment was to ensure that there was nothing unusually salient about the accessibility of names; thus, we assessed readers’ access to an object associated with the main character rather than the character’s name. Again, readers demonstrated increased accessibility to the main character when it was rementioned in the narrative, and readers demonstrated reduced accessibility to the main character when a new character was introduced. A third experiment compared more-skilled and less-skilled readers’ abilities to manage these mental representations during narrative comprehension. Findings were consistent with research suggesting that more-skilled readers are more skilled at attenuating interfering information (i.e., suppression). Data from all 3 experiments suggest that successful narrative comprehension involves managing mental representations of salient and often times interfering characters