Chapter 11: Discourse and Inference

11.1 From Linguistic Form to Mental Models of the World

• What do sentence meanings look like?
• What information do mental models contain?
• Researchers at Work 11.1: Probing for the contents of mental models
• Box 11.1: Individual differences in visual imagery during reading
• Method 11.1: Converging techniques for studying mental models
• What information “sticks” in memory?
• The importance of background knowledge
• Language at Large 11.1: What does it mean to be literate?
• 11.1 Questions to Contemplate

11.2 Pronoun Problems

• Box 11.2: Pronoun systems across languages
• How do we resolve the meanings of pronouns?
• What makes some discourse referents more salient than others?
• The repeated-name penalty
• Where’s this going?
• 11.2 Questions to Contemplate

11.3 Pronouns in Real Time

• Coordinating multiple sources of information
• Pronoun resolution by children
• Box 11.3: Pronoun types and structural constraints
• 11.3 Questions to Contemplate

11.4 Drawing Inferences and Making Connections

• Bridging inferences
• Language at Large 11.2: The Kuleshov effect: How inferences bring life to film
• Presuppositions
• Elaborative inferences
• Box 11.4: Using brain waves to study the time course of discourse processing
• The cognitive costs of elaborative inferences
• 11.4 Questions to Contemplate

11.5 Understanding Metaphor

• Does metaphor rise from the ashes of literal meaning?
• How are metaphorical meanings computed?
• Language at Large 11.3: The use and abuse of metaphor
• What skills are needed to understand metaphor?
• 11.5 Questions to Contemplate
• Digging Deeper: Shallow processors of builders of rich meaning?

 

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