The study of cognitive representations and processes involved in personal pronoun interpretation allows one to investigate on a small scale the cognitive representations and processes of discourse comprehension. A review of the literature identifies four fundamental processes in personal pronoun interpretation: (A) syntactic constrains application, (B) gender, number, and person matching, (C) inferential selection, and, (D) discourse focus updating. A preliminary data collection from human performance has shown the importance of the application of syntactic constrains for pronoun interpretation. However, the level of specification for the representations and processes attained by the literature review and the preliminary experiment is not sufficient, therefore justifying the development of a more elaborate on-line pronoun interpretation process model. In order to attain a better model of the personal pronoun interpretation processes, the research approach has been to: (A) establish a strong link between the text linguistic features on one hand, and the cognitive representations and processes on the other hand through the construction-interpretation model, and (B) to reduce the gap between the experimental task specificity, and the general cognitive representations and processes assumed by the model. A second experiment, using experimental texts implementing a combination of many levels of representation, verified most of the model predictions. The model of the four interpretation processes as well as the empirical evidences support a point of view where the interpretation process for personal pronouns ends at various points during reading. The compound process of syntactic analysis and progressive semantic interpretation as well as the component processes associated with specific levels of representation explain the partiality of the pronoun interpretation process. The construction-interpretation model shows that the location of the execution of the interpretatio
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.28734 |
| Date | January 1994 |
| Creators | Emond, Bruno |
| Contributors | Frederiksen, Carl H. (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | French |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001449734, proquestno: NN05699, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
Page generated in 0.0048 seconds