Inhibition Needs No Negativity: Negative Links in the Construction-Integration Model

The Construction-Integration (CI) model represents sentence comprehension using nodes composed of propositions, words, and other information connected by links. These representations include multiple possible structures for a sentence. Successful simulation of sentence comprehension requires that inappropriate or irrelevant structures are not selected by the model. The standard CI model contains inhibitory links between possible structures to aid in the selection of the appropriate alternative. An alternative account of the CI model, the knowledge-based account, proposes the use of positive links only to disambiguate alternative structures instead of inhibitory links. This study compared these two accounts and found both models worked equally well with respect to number of iterations needed for the network to settle on a pattern of activation, the amount of activation for the selected nodes, and the node selected between mutually exclusive representations of a text, suggesting that both accounts produce similar representations