Toward Neurally-Inspired Computational Models of Narrative∗

In the spirit of the neuroscience theme of this year’s meeting, I will describe a set of cognitive and neurophysiological phenomena that are important for the processing of narrative text at the discourse level. Text processing depends on sequential structure in language and also in the events that language describes. Semantic representations of events capture perceptual and motor properties of described situations, leveraging previous lived experience. Although a large number of neural systems are involved in processing narrative text, a constrained subset of systems are selectively engaged by discourse-level processing. To bring these phenomena together, I will present a simple neurally-inspired computational model of visual event processing that may provide a helpful analogy for some features of language processing. 1998 ACM Subject Classification J.4 Psychology