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Cross‐cognitive Aspects of Discourse Comprehension: Semantic Post‐representation
Author(s) -
Le Ny JeanFrançois
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
international journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.75
H-Index - 62
eISSN - 1464-066X
pISSN - 0020-7594
DOI - 10.1080/002075998400150
Subject(s) - comprehension , cognition , representation (politics) , psychology , cognitive science , semantic memory , interpretation (philosophy) , mental representation , cognitive psychology , cognitive linguistics , semantics (computer science) , linguistics , computer science , philosophy , neuroscience , politics , political science , law , programming language
Four related sciences, cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics and neurobiology, are compared in a cross‐cognitive way with respect to their approaches in the study of discourse comprehension, in particular its final product, semantic post‐representations. The nature and structure of these, as they are built in a human mind after processing a short piece of discourse (one or a few sentences), seem to be best described in the framework of activation models, a family in which the basic processes of comprehension are considered to be activation of semantic units from long‐term memory, predication and construction of higher‐level propositional constituents. The notion of “activation level”, applied to such representational units in working memory, is particularly fruitful in this framework. Besides, a satisfying neural interpretation of this psychological type of model can be proposed. The paper shortly presents a series of experiments, involving a semantic probing technique and three main categories of factors, with results that support the semantic post‐representation view, in addition to others. A critical comparison of this analysis with neurofunctional imagery data confirms the necessity of cross‐cognitive exchanges.