Comprehension of Written and Spoken Language Lecture 10

• "The" is a definite article, while "A," "an," and "some" are indefinite articles.
• Gernsbacher predicts that sentences with definite articles will be more coherent and sensible than sentences with indefinite articles.
• Situation models are representations of real-world situations described in text, including temporal and spatial information, objects, locations, people, and inferences.
• Reference is the linguistic process of alluding to a concept using another name.
• Implication is an intended but not explicitly mentioned reference in a sentence.
• Inference is the process by which readers draw connections between concepts, determine referents, and derive conclusions.
• Clark's term for constructing a connection between concepts is called bridging.
• Just and Carpenter (1980) used eye-tracking procedures to study reading comprehension, measuring gaze duration on each word.
• In spoken language and conversation, the current speaker usually gets to select the next speaker, and there are rules regarding turn-taking in conversations.
• Grice's conversational maxims, derived from the Cooperative Principle, assume each participant in a conversation is sincere and appropriate.
• Direct and second-order online theories are models used during conversations to understand what our conversational partners know and are interested in.
• Indirect requests are a polite way to ask someone to do something, while face saving is a way to avoid violating the relevance maxim in conversations.
• Egocentric speech is when speakers fail to appreciate another person's perspective and design utterances solely for their own understanding.
• Keysar (1998) found that adults often speak egocentrically during conversations.
• Our first pass at an utterance is typically egocentric.

This quiz covers the overview of Miller’s fourth and fifth levels of language analysis which focus on the conceptual and belief levels. It includes examples of ambiguous sentences and traditional comprehension research related to linguistic intuitions and memory.