The Role of Background Knowledge in Sentence and DiscourseProcessingThesis Proposal

One of the challenges of cognitive psychology is developing general models that explain a wide range of empirical phenomena. We propose a unitary theory that addresses data from several text comprehension domains: metaphor understanding, processing of semantic illusions, lexical ambiguity, text memory and elaborative encoding. This theory assumes that sentence processing at the semantic level is incremental, nondeterministic and incomplete, and uses background knowledge hints. While the focus of the theory is on the semantic aspects of language comprehension, we plan to use syntactic ambiguity as a computational constraint. This proposal describes in some detail the sets of data to which this theory has already been applied and the empirical domains that are still to be addressed. We intend to implement this theory as a single model in the ACT-R framework (Anderson & Lebiere, 1998).