Abstract
Starting with the facts that not everything that is understood is remembered, and that not everything that is remembered is understood, this paper urges that models of language processing should be able to make a distinction between comprehension and memory. To this end, a case is made for a spreading activation process as being the essential ingredient of the comprehension process. It is argued that concepts activated during comprehension not only restrict the search set for candidate concepts to be used in a top-down fashion, they also constitute part of an episodic representation that can come to be part of long-term memory. The way in which these representations atrophy is discussed, as is the way in which their idiosyncratic components are eliminated in producing representations in semantic memory. Some observations on the comprehension and memory of text are made and arguments are presented to show how intrusions and omissions in recall can be handled. Some existing experimental data is reanalized in terms of the proposed model and alternative interpretations consistent with the model are shown to be possible.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 53-69 |
| Number of pages | 17 |
| Journal | Cognitive Science |
| Volume | 2 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 1978 |
Funding
If a model of human cognition is really to be a model of human cognition, one of the things it ought to do is to distinguish human cognitive capacities that are in reality distinct. Two capacities that current models in both psychology and artificial intelligence (AI) generally fail to distinguish are the capacity to understand and the capacity to remember. The usual theoretical strategy that existing models employ seems to be to convert an input string into an underlying representation of its meaning, and to store that representation in memory as an addition to the knowledge base. Now this is not completely wrong, but neither is it quite right. People understand things they do not properly remember, small talk, for example; and they remember things they do not properly understand, Jabberwocky being a case in point. By failing to distinguish comprehension and memory, we may fail to capture essential aspects of each, and the models we ad(luce may be correspondingly inadequate. Accordingly, one of the major issues to be *This work was supported in part by a Spencer Fellowship awarded by the National Academy of Education. and in part by the National Institute of Education under Grant No. HEW-N1E-G-74-0007 and Contract No. MS-NIE-C-400-76-0116. Requests for reprints should be sent to the author at the Center for the Study of Reading, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois 61820.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Artificial Intelligence