ADHD is a psychiatric disorder characterised by persistent and developmentally inappropriate levels of inattention, impulsivity and hyperactivity. It is known that children with ADHD tend to produce incoherent discourses, e.g. by narrating events out of sequence. Here the aetiology of ADHD becomes of interest. One prominent theory is that ADHD is an executive function disorder, showing deficiencies of planning. Given the close link between planning, verb tense and discourse coherence postulated in van Lambalgen and Hamm (The proper treatment of (...) events, 2004), we predicted specific deviations in the verb tenses produced by children with ADHD. Here we report on an experiment corroborating these predictions. (shrink)

ADHD is a psychiatric disorder characterised by persistent and developmentally inappropriate levels of inattention, impulsivity and hyperactivity. It is known that children with ADHD tend to produce incoherent discourses, e.g. by narrating events out of sequence. Here the aetiology of ADHD becomes of interest. One prominent theory is that ADHD is an executive function disorder, showing deficiencies of planning. Given the close link between planning, verb tense and discourse coherence postulated in van Lambalgen and Hamm (The proper treatment of (...) events, 2004), we predicted specific deviations in the verb tenses produced by children with ADHD. Here we report on an experiment corroborating these predictions. (shrink)

While corpus studies have shown that discourse connectives that convey the same coherence relation can display subtle differences, research on online discourse processing has only focused on a rather limited set of connectives. Yet, different connectives – for example, rare or polyfunctional ones – might elicit different reading patterns. In order to explore this assumption, we test the robustness of discourse processing for French native speakers by measuring the way they process causal and concessive sentences (...) that are conveyed by either an appropriate or inappropriate connective. Throughout three experiments, we change important characteristics of the connectives: we first test frequently used connectives, secondly less frequent ones, and finally less frequent connectives that are polyfunctional and for which different functions clearly compete. Our results show that the processing for incoherent items was affected for all connectives, however readers showed altered reading fluency when infrequent connectives were used. We conclude that discourse processing is quite robust and that readers are able to insert meaning conveyed by rare connectives while still showing the highest reading ease with frequent connectives. (shrink)

IntroductionEspecially in the chronic phase, individuals with traumatic brain injury may still have impairments at the discourse level, even if these remain undetected by conventional aphasia tests. As a consequence, IwTBI may be impaired in conversational behavior and disadvantaged in their socio-communicative participation. Even though handling discourse is thought to be a basic requirement for participation and quality of life, only a handful of test procedures assessing discourse disorders have been developed so far. The MAKRO Screening is (...) a recently developed screening tool designed to assess discourse impairments. The test construction is based on psycholinguistic frameworks and the concept of macro-rules, which refer to cognitive functions responsible for organizing and reducing complex information in discourse.AimThe aim of our study was to investigate discourse processing in IwTBI in different tasks and to assess problems in communicative participation in the post-acute and chronic phase. In this context, we also aimed to analyze the influence of the severity of the initial impairment and the verbal executive abilities on the discourse performance. Additionally, the impact of macrolinguistic discourse impairments and verbal fluency on perceived communicative participation was targeted in our analysis.MethodsData from 23 IwTBI and 23 healthy control subjects have been analyzed. They completed two subtests of the MAKRO screening: Text production and Inferences. Discourse performance was examined in relation to measures of semantic fluency and verbal task-switching. Socio-communicative problems were evaluated with the German version of the La Trobe Communication Questionnaire.ResultsIwTBI showed lower test results than the control group in the two subtests of the MAKRO-Screening. Difficulties in picture-based narrative text production also indicated greater perceived difficulties in communicative participation. We also found that the subject’s performance on the MAKRO-Screening subtests can partly be explained by underlying dysexecutive symptoms and the severity of their injury. The preliminary results of our study show that cognitive-linguistic symptoms in IwTBI are also evident in the chronic phase. These can be detected with procedures referring to the discourse level, such as the MAKRO-Screening. The assessment of discourse performance should be an integral part in the rehabilitation of IwTBI in order to detect cognitive-linguistic communication disorders and to evaluate their impact on socio-communicative participation. (shrink)

This study draws upon naturalistic ethnographic data to expand current understandings regarding the socio-communicative capabilities and challenges of children with autism spectrum disorders in mid-childhood. Affording a view of the children’s spontaneous interactions within naturally occurring family and community settings, the study explores a range of discursive resources utilized by the children to accomplish socially reciprocal positive politeness practices in tandem with others. Emphasizing contextualized deployment of politeness forms in interaction, the practice-based conception developed here construes positive politeness as a (...) discursive process encompassing both socio-cultural and interpersonal knowledge/skills; and contributes to a perspective in which social and communicative realms are conceptualized as integrated domains of functioning. (shrink)

Research has shown that it requires less time to process information that is part of an objective causal relation describing states of affairs in the world (She was out of breath because she was running), than information that is part of a subjective relation (She must have been in a hurry because she was running) expressing a claim or conclusion and a supporting argument. Representing subjectivity seems to require extra cognitive operations. In Mental Spaces Theory (MST; Fauconnier, Gilles. 1994. Mental (...) spaces: Aspects of meaning construction in natural language. Cambridge: MIT Press) the difference between these two relation types can be described in terms of an extra mental space in the discourse representation of subjective relations: representing the Subject of Consciousness (SoC). In processing terms, this might imply that the processing difference is not present if this SoC has already been established in the discourse. We tested this prediction in two eye tracking experiments. The results of Experiment 1 showed that signaling the subjectivity of the relation by introducing a subject of consciousness beforehand did not diminish the processing asymmetry compared to a neutral context. However, the relative complexity of subjective relations was diminished in the context of Free Indirect Speech (No! He was absolutely sure. There was no doubt about it. She was running so she was in hurry; Experiment 2). In terms of MST and the representation of subjectivity in general, this implies that not only creating a representation of a thinking subject, but also assigning a claim to this thinking subject requires extra processing effort. (shrink)

The present paper analyzes how the semantic and pragmatic functions of closed class categories, or grammatical morphemes (i.e., inflections and function words), organize discourse processing. Grammatical morphemes tend to express a small set of conceptual distinctions that organize a wide range of objects and relations, usually expressed by content or open class words (i.e., nouns and verbs), into situations anchored to a discourse context. Therefore, grammatical morphemes and content words cooperate in guiding the construction of a situation (...) model during discourse comprehension by specifying complementary aspects of described situations. The paper reviews and extends analytical and empirical evidence for this grammatical‐conceptual correspondence, and suggests that the correspondence developed in response to the cognitive demands of discourse processing. Thus the distinction between open and closed linguistic categories is interpreted in terms of a fundamental correspondence between conceptual and linguistic structure that helps organize discourse processing. (shrink)

Classical approaches such as frames, scripts,... have been unable to deal with the kind of inferences necessary in natural language processing situations such as text comprehension. Shastri & Ajjanagadde (1993), proposed a local connectionist model for the sort of reasoning requiring such a fast inference. The problem with this system is that it controls only the adequacy of argument- fillers, leaving untouched the activation control issue, namely, why we perform certain inferences, and not others, in a given situation. The (...) aim of this paper is to examine how a focus, in the sense of Grosz (1981). could operate as a theoretic constraint with the above reasoner system to handle two aspects: inference control and anaphora resolution (i.e., antecedent activation), during text understanding. (shrink)

A modal logic for translating a sequence of English sentences to a sequence of logical forms is presented, characterized by Kripke models with points formed from input/output sequences, and valuations determined by entailment relations. Previous approaches based (to one degree or another) on Quantified Dynamic Logic are embeddable within it. Applications to presupposition and ambiguity are described, and decision procedures and axiomatizations supplied.

Research spanning linguistics, psychology, and philosophy suggests that speakers and hearers are finely attuned to perspectives and viewpoints that are not their own, even though perspectival information is not encoded directly in the morphosyntax of languages like English. While some terms seem to require a perspective or a judge for interpretation (e.g., epithets, evaluative adjectives, locational PPs, etc.), perspective may also be determined on the basis of subtle information spanning multiple sentences, especially in vivid styles of narrative reporting. In this (...) paper, I develop an account of the cues that are involved in evaluating and maintaining non-speaker perspectives, and present an economy-based discourse processing model of perspective that embodies two core principles. First, perspectives are subject to a “speaker-default,” but may shift to a non-speaker perspective if sufficient contextual cues are provided. Second, the processor follows the path of least resistance to maintaining perspective, opting to maintain the current perspective across sentences as long as the shifted perspective continues to be coherent. The predictions of the model are tested in a series of offline and online studies, manipulating the form of an attitude report and the tense of the sentence that follows. Implications for processing perspective and viewpoint in speech and narrative forms are explored. (shrink)

Scholars have debated the role that altruistic considerations play—and should play—in recruitment and decision-making processes for clinical trials. Little empirical data are available to support their various perspectives. We analyzed 140 audiotaped pediatric informed consent sessions, of which 95 (68%) included at least one discussion of how participation in a cancer clinical trial might benefit: 1) the pursuit of scientific knowledge generally; 2) other children with cancer specifically; and 3) “the future” and other vaguely defined recipients. Clinicians initiated most (80%) (...) of these discussions of altruism. The enrollment rate of children in the clinical trial was high (83%) overall, but not higher among children whose parents were involved in an altruism-oriented discussion. These findings suggest that: (1) clinicians invoke a spectrum of altruistic considerations rather than a single monothematic notion of altruism, and (2) the effect of altruistic considerations on subsequent enrollment decisions is marginal. While further research on this topic is warranted, bioethical debate should strive to reflect the diversity of altruistic discourse in clinical research encounters and to place this discourse in the context of other, including nonaltruistic, considerations. (shrink)

Models of discourse and narration elaborated within the classical compositional framework have been characterized as bottom-up models, according to which discourse analysis proceeds incrementally, from phrase and sentence local meaning to discourse global meaning. In this paper we will argue against these models. Assuming as a case study the issue of discourse coherence, we suggest that the assessment of coherence is a top-down process, in which the construction of a situational interpretation at the global meaning level (...) guides local meaning analysis. In support of our hypothesis, we explore the role of executive functions (brain functions involved in planning and organization of goal-oriented behaviors) in coherence’s establishment, discussing the results of several studies on narrative abilities of patients with brain injuries. We suggest that, compared to other models of discourse processing focused on comprehension, our model is a viable candidate for an integrated account of discourse comprehension and production. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPolitical actors use metaphor in their speeches in order to frame political issues [Charteris-Black, J.. Politicians and rhetoric: The persuasive power of metaphor. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan]. If they succeed in imposing a particular frame, especially when there is no agreement on the definition of certain political issues, this can become the prevailing way for referring to that issue [Semino, E.. Metaphor in discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press]. In this research, we argue that this was the case for the metaphor (...) of the JOURNEY in the Catalan political conflict during electoral periods. To that end we use Critical Metaphor Analysis [Charteris-Black, J.. Corpus approaches to critical metaphor analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan] to analyse televised campaign ads from the last three elections for the Parliament of Catalonia – from 2010, 2012, and 2015 – in order to identify how political actors’ use metaphors to talk about the Catalan political situation during these years and to verify if JOURNEY metaphor resulted into the dominant narrative. The results show that the political situation has been conceptualized in terms of a ‘process en route,’ although the narratives generated by the political actors that shaped that discourse differ. (shrink)

The article presents a model of understanding that takes into account interaction, cultural knowledge, and the constraints of organizations and institutions. It analyzes discourse and cognition in high school biology classes and clinical consultations involving discussions of genetics. The analytical lenses of constraint satisfaction, coherence-based reasoning, and collective cognition reveal multilayered social, cultural, and interactional components of authority and agency that influence understanding. The analysis reveals similarities across settings in discourse structure and the ways that participants relate to (...) local constraints. In both types of settings, participants attempt to develop process narratives that present a sequential or causal relationship between information and lead to remembered understandings of concepts. However, the absence of certain process information that links terms or concepts functions like a missing plot point in a story, hindering the development of process narratives and understandings. In order to cover such information gaps, students and patients construct and display grey boxes. In addition to talk and text, these consist of various actions and resources specific to a local discourse framework such as pointing at graphics, tabular information, and symbols. Grey boxes satisfy the organizational constraints of time, resources, and task structure that affect interaction related to understanding concepts and procedures, but their connection to a particular discourse framework restricts the transfer of knowledge between settings. The power of medical practitioners and teachers to enhance or restrict understandings relates to the ways that they accommodate the use of grey boxes during interactions with clients and students. Professional frames of reference that teachers or practitioners apply to task interactions may constrain the ways students or clients apply grey boxes and process narratives. Awareness of the functions of process narratives and grey boxes presents opportunities to modify local discourse frameworks and increase understandings of concepts, medical conditions, and treatment options. (shrink)

Probabilistic models of sentence comprehension are increasingly relevant to questions concerning human language processing. However, such models are often limited to syntactic factors. This restriction is unrealistic in light of experimental results suggesting interactions between syntax and other forms of linguistic information in human sentence processing. To address this limitation, this article introduces two sentence processing models that augment a syntactic component with information about discourse co-reference. The novel combination of probabilistic syntactic components with co-reference classifiers (...) permits them to more closely mimic human behavior than existing models. The first model uses a deep model of linguistics, based in part on probabilistic logic, allowing it to make qualitative predictions on experimental data; the second model uses shallow processing to make quantitative predictions on a broad-coverage reading-time corpus. (shrink)

During 'cyclic' historical periods it would be correct to interpret religious processes in terms of interaction of two essentially different, but substantially, structurally and functionally comparative types of integrating cultural complexes that, in historical perspective, compete with each other on the effect on individuals and society in general. Such complexes represent secular and religious culture. Contemporary socio-cultural situation can be defined as an asymmetric representativeness of both secular and religious cultures. In a modern secular society, dominance of a secular culture (...) over a religious one can be manifested in three basic dimensions: substantial, regulative and subjective ones. Secular culture is adopted during the primary socialization process. However, religious culture is still adopted through conscious, voluntary selection in younger or more mature age. It may be possible to determine two basic attitudes of the contemporary man towards religion. The first attitude may be called 'reversive' and the other one 'conversive'. Za 'ciklicne' istorijske periode ispravna je interpretacija religijskih procesa u terminu uzajamnog dejstva dva sustinski razlicita ali sadrzajno, strukturalno i funkcionalno komparativna tipa integrisucih kulturnih kompleksa koji u istorijskoj perspektivi jedan drugom konkurisu u uticaju na pojedinca i drustvo. Takvi kompleksi su svetovna i religiozna kultura. Savremena sociokulturna situacija se moze definisati kao asimetrija reprezentativnosti svetovne i religiozne kulture. Dominacija svetovne nad religioznom kulturom u savremenom sekularizovnom drustvu manifestuje se u tri osnovne dimenzije: predmetnoj, regulativnoj i subjektivnoj. Svetovna kultrura se masovno usvaja u procesu primarne socijalizacije. Religiozna kultura se pak, usvaja samosvesnim, voljnim izborom u mladjem ili starijem uzrastu. Moguce je izdvojiti dva osnovna nacina obracanja savremenog 'sekularizovanog') coveka religiji. Prvi nacin mozemo nazvati 'reverzivnim' a drugi 'konverzivnim'. (shrink)

This paper describes a computational model for analyzing arguments in discourse. In particular, the model describes processes necessary for interpreting one uninterrupted argument from a speaker. The resulting output is a representation for the underlying claim and evidence relations between propositions of the argument. For our processing model we present: (i) a characterization of coherent orderings of propositions, used to limit search for interpretation of each new proposition (ii) a working definition of the evidence relation, used to recognize (...) connections between propositions (iii) a theory of the function and use of clue words — special words and phrases indicating the structure of the argument — then used in the analysis to control search for interpretation and verification of evidence relations. (shrink)

The article explores the concept of humanism both in modern discourse and in historical retrospective. Human has always been at the center of philosophy, regardless of what spheres of being were studied. Anthropology, cultural studies, psychology, philosophy, and many other sciences explore various manifestations of a person, all of which are ultimately designed to answer perhaps one of the most critical questions – what makes us human? However, this discourse significantly changed over the course of two thousand years. (...) For example, Martin Heidegger points out an important nuance of the emergence of the concept of humanism, namely, as a kind of chauvinism – the division into humans (Romans) and non-humans (barbarians). This point of view is often overlooked, but it is critical to understanding the essence of this phenomenon. In the subsequent era of the Middle Ages, human was understood as the opposite of the divine, but in such realities, there were humanistic ideals and values. Already in the Renaissance, a return to the traditions of antiquity was announced, but the understanding of a person acquired a romantic character. Humanism clearly saw something more in a person than a person himself could demonstrate. It is for this metaphysical image that many critics of humanism have criticized this phenomenon. However, where there is criticism, there is progress, which is why this concept has gained a new round of discourse, which is why new trends have appeared that have brought the concept of humanism to a new theoretical level. As a historical phenomenon, humanism is faced with certain difficulties of new eras; because of these collisions, humanism is modified and adapted. Among humanism’s problems are multiculturalism, technological breakthroughs, and the need to search for new theories. In its development, the course of humanism takes on various forms and iterations. It is worth mentioning transhumanism (the idea of becoming someone more than just a human), posthumanism (philosophical views on human nature as a posthuman), and global humanism. (shrink)

A model is presented that addresses both the distribution and comprehension of different forms of referring expressions in language. This model is expressed in a formalism (Kamp & Reyle, 1993) that uses interpretive rules to map syntactic representations onto representations of discourse. Basic interpretive rules are developed for names, pronouns, definite descriptions, and quantified descriptions. These rules are triggered by syntactic input and interact dynamically with representations of discourse to establish reference and coreference. This interaction determines the ease (...) with which coreference can be established for different linguistic forms given the existing discourse context. The performance of the model approximates that observed in studies of intuitive judgments of grammaticality and studies using online measures of language comprehension. The model uses the same basic interpretive mechanisms for coreference within and between sentences, thereby linking the domain traditionally studied by generative linguists to domains that have been of concern primarily to psychologists and computational linguists. (shrink)

Discourses of interdisciplinary health‐care are becoming more centralised in the context of global healthcare practices, which are increasingly based on multisystem interventions. As with all dominant discourses that are narrated into being, many others have been silenced and decentralised in the process. While questions of the nature and constituents of interdisciplinary practices continue to be debated and rehearsed, this paper focuses on the discourse of interdisciplinary collaboration using psychiatry as an example, with the aim of highlighting competing and alternative (...) discourses. The fundamental premise of this paper is that collaborative relationships form the basis of interdisciplinary practices in psychiatry. Through a critical engagement and a deconstructive reading of the pretext, context and subtexts of interdisciplinarity, we interrogate the concept of interdisciplinary practice within psychiatry. We contend that an important part of understanding and further conceptualising the discourse is through fracturing it. This process is illustrated in the successive stages of our conceptual map of discourse development: establishing, maintaining and developing discourses. An understanding of interdisciplinary practice is not only critical for psychiatry, but also offers important insights into the performance of collaborative failures and indeed successes across nursing and allied health professions. (shrink)

Reduced forms such as the pronoun he provide little information about their intended meaning compared to more elaborate descriptions such as the lead singer of Coldplay. Listeners must therefore use contextual information to recover their meaning. Across languages, there appears to be a trade‐off between the informativity of a form and the prominence of its referent. For example, Italian adults generally interpret informationally empty null pronouns as in the sentence Corre (meaning “He/She/It runs”) as referring to the most prominent referent (...) in the discourse, and more informative overt pronouns (e.g., lui in Lui corre, “He runs”) as referring to less prominent referents. Although children acquiring Italian are known to experience difficulties interpreting pronouns, it is unclear how they acquire this division of pragmatic labor between null and overt subject pronouns, and how this relates to the development of their cognitive capacities. Here we show that cognitive development can account for the general interpretation patterns displayed by Italian‐speaking children and adults. Using experimental studies and computational simulations in a framework modeling bounded‐rational behavior, we argue that null pronoun interpretation is influenced by working memory capacity and thus appears to depend on discourse context, whereas overt pronoun interpretation is influenced by processing speed, suggesting that listeners must reason about the speaker's choices. Our results demonstrate that cognitive capacities may constrain the acquisition of linguistic forms and their meanings in various ways. The novel predictions generated by the computational simulations point out several directions for future research. (shrink)

When nature's energies communicate what human beings do not want to hear and when human beings experience the pressures of this communication as reality, they confront discursive practices from nature and in nature. The Peruvian myth of Cavillaca, although a cultural artifact, nevertheless expresses what human beings cannot change or mediate in nature; nature presents grades of reality larger than human constructions of the real.

In line with recent developments in leadership research which conceptualise leadership as a discursive and collaborative process rather than a set of static attributes and characteristics displayed by individuals, this paper explores some of the discursive processes through which leadership emerges in a sports team. Drawing on over ten hours of naturally occurring interactions among the players of a women’s netball team in the UK, and applying the concepts of deontic and epistemic status and stance, we identify and describe some (...) of the specific processes through which leadership is claimed and assigned, as well as rejected, passed on, and eventually accepted by different team members at different points throughout an interaction. While the processes outlined in our analysis contribute to theoretical discussions regarding the notion of emergent leadership, this paper also demonstrates the benefits of taking a discourse analytical approach to leadership, and outlines how such an approach enables researchers to empirically capture emergent leadership in situ. (shrink)

This present book explores recent advances in modeling discourse processes, in particular, new approaches aimed at understanding pathological language behavior specific to schizophrenia. The contributors examine the modeling paradigm of formal semantics, which falls within the scope of both linguistics and logic while providing overlapping links with other fields such as philosophy of language and cognitive psychology. This book is based on results presented during the series of workshops on Coherence and Discourse organized by SLAM, a project developed (...) to systemize the study of pathological language processing by taking an overarching interdisciplinary approach combining psychology, linguistics, computer science and philosophy. The principle focus is on conversations produced by people with psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and autism. The contributions come from young and experienced researchers, and invited speakers. The book appeals to likeminded students and researchers. (shrink)