Showing papers by "Gail McKoon published in 1996"

Reliability of prosodic cues for resolving syntactic ambiguity.

Abstract: Although previous research has shown that listeners can use prosody to resolve syntactic ambiguities in spoken sentences, it is not clear whether naive, untrained speakers in experimental situations ordinarily produce the prosodic cues necessary for disambiguating such sentences. In a series of experiments, the authors found that neither professional nor untrained speakers consistently produced such prosodic cues when simply reading ambiguous sentences in a disambiguating discourse context. Speakers who were aware of the ambiguities and were told to intentionally pronounce the sentences with one meaning of the other, however, did produce sufficient prosodic cues for listeners to identify the intended meanings.

Pronoun resolution without pronouns: some consequences of memory-based text processing.

Abstract: A memory-based processing approach to discourse comprehension emphasizes the rapid deployment of information in memory to facilitate understanding of the text that is currently being read. S. B. Greene, R. J. Gerrig, G. McKoon, and R. Ratcliff (1994) demonstrated that when a text described the reunion of 2 characters who had previously discussed a 3rd character, the accessibility of the 3rd character increased, and the use of an unheralded pronoun (R. J. Gerrig, 1986) to refer to that character was felicitous. In experiments in this article, the authors demonstrate that concepts related to the unheralded pronoun also increase in accessibility and that those concepts form associations in memory with concepts present in the discourse at the time the pronoun is used. The authors also show that the increase in accessibility for the referent of the pronoun, as well as the appropriate long-term memory associations, occurs even in the absence of the pronoun.

Bias effects in implicit memory tasks

Abstract: A major focus of recent research in memory has been performance on implicit tasks. The phenomenon of most interest has been repetition priming, the effect that prior exposure to a stimulus has on later perception of the stimulus or on a later decision about the stimulus. Picture naming, word identification, and word production in stem- and fragment-completion tasks all show repetition priming effects. The separation of implicit from explicit memory systems provides one account of this data, but a different theoretical view is proposed here: Repetition-priming effects come about because the processes that perform a task are biased by prior exposure to a stimulus. The processing of the prior stimulus leaves behind byproducts, temporary modifications of the processes, which influence later processing. The aim of this article is to demonstrate the potential of this view for developing new theories and for prompting new empirical questions.

Sentential context effects on lexical decisions with a cross-modal instead of an all-visual procedure.

Abstract: J. L. Nicol and D. Swinney (1989) reported facilitation in a cross-modal lexical-decision task as evidence that implicit objects of verbs (WH-traces) are reinstated during comprehension. G. McKoon and R. Ratcliff (1994) found the same priming effects in the absence of implicit objects, suggesting that the effects are attributable to some factor other than a syntactic process that would fill in implicit objects. J. L. Nicol, J. D. Fodor, and D. Swinney (1994) questioned the relevance of McKoon and Ratcliff's findings because they were obtained with all-visual rather than cross-modal presentation. In 2 experiments, the authors replicated McKoon and Ratcliff's results using cross-modal lexical decision.