The Neurocognitive Poetics Model of Literary Reading 10 Years After

The neurocognitive poetics model (NCPM) of literary reading was developed about 10 years ago as a theoretical tool for generating and guiding scientific studies of literature. It introduced testable hypotheses concerning two central phenomena of literary reading that had been so far badly neglected by research on text or discourse processing in experimental reading research, psycholinguistics, or cognitive neuroscience. These phenomena—immersion and affective-aesthetic processes—have since then been investigated in a number of studies supporting the NCPM’s main assumptions. In the article under discussion, the author explains the development of the NCPM.

DO L1-L2 DIFFERENCES IN DISCOURSE PROCESSING REFLECT PROCESSING DEMANDS OR DIFFICULTY OF FORM-FUNCTION MAPPING?

We examined what causes L1-L2 differences in sensitivity to prominence cues in discourse processing. Participants listened to recorded stories in segment-by-segment fashion at their own pace. Each story established a pair of contrasting items, and one item from the pair was rementioned and manipulated to carry either a contrastive or presentational pitch accent. By directly comparing the current self-paced listening data to previously obtained experimenter-paced listening data, we tested whether reducing online-processing demands allows L2 learners to show a nativelike behavior, such that contrastive pitch accents facilitate later ruling out the salient alternative. However, reduced time pressure failed to lead even higher proficiency L1-Korean learners of English to reach a nativelike level, suggesting that L2 learners’ nonnativelike processing and representation of the prominence cue in spoken discourse processing can be due to the inherent difficulty of fully learning a complex form-function mapping rather than to online-processing demands.

Lexical and Structural Cues to Discourse Processing in First and Second Language

Discourse connectives are lexical items like “but” and “so” that are well-known to influence the online processing of the discourse relations they convey. Yet, discourse relations like causality or contrast can also be signaled by other means than connectives, such as syntactic structures. So far, the influence of these alternative signals for discourse processing has been comparatively under-researched. In particular, their processing in a second language remains entirely unexplored. In a series of three self-paced reading experiments, we compare the reading patterns of contrastive relations by native French-speakers and non-native speakers of French with English as a first language. We focus on the effect of syntactic parallelism and how it interacts with different types of connectives. We test whether native and non-native readers equally recruit parallelism to process contrast in combination with or without a connective (Experiment 1), with a frequent vs. infrequent connective (Experiment 2) and with an ambiguous vs. unambiguous connective (Experiment 3), thus varying the explicitness and ease of retrieval of the contrast relation. Our results indicate that parallelism plays an important role for both groups of readers, but that it is a more prominent cue for non-native speakers, while its effect is modulated by task difficulty for native participants.

A DISCOURSE-BASED INFORMATION RETRIEVAL FOR TAMIL LITERARY TEXTS

Tamil literature has many valuable thoughts that can help the human community to lead a successful and a happy life. Tamil literary works are abundantly available and searched on the World Wide Web (WWW), but the existing search systems follow a keyword-based match strategy which fails to satisfy the user needs. This necessitates the demand for a focused Information Retrieval System that semantically analyses the Tamil literary text which will eventually improve the search system performance. This paper proposes a novel Information Retrieval framework that uses discourse processing techniques which aids in semantic analysis and representation of the Tamil Literary text. The proposed framework has been tested using two ancient literary works, the Thirukkural and Naladiyar, which were written during 300 BCE. The Thirukkural comprises 1330 couplets, each 7 words long, while the Naladiyar consists of 400 quatrains, each 15 words long. The proposed system, tested with all the 1330 Thirukkural couplets and 400 Naladiyar quatrains, achieved a mean average precision (MAP) score of 89%. The performance of the proposed framework has been compared with Google Tamil search and a keyword-based search which is a substandard version of the proposed framework. Google Tamil search achieved a MAP score of 56% and keyword-based method achieved a MAP score of 62% which shows that the discourse processing techniques improves the search performance of an Information Retrieval system.

Do worlds have (fourth) walls? A Text World Theory approach to direct address in Fleabag

This article examines direct address, or ‘breaking the fourth wall’, in the BBC TV series Fleabag. It applies Text World Theory to telecinematic discourse for the first time and, in doing so, contributes to developing cognitive approaches in the field of telecinematic stylistics. Text World Theory, originally a cognitive linguistic discourse processing framework, is used to examine how multimodal cues contribute to the creation of imagined worlds. We examine three examples of direct address in Fleabag, featuring actor gaze alongside use of the second-person you or actor gaze alone . Our analysis highlights the need to account for the different deictic referents of you, with the pronoun able to refer intra- and extradiegetically. We also explore viewers’ ontological positioning because ‘breaking the fourth wall’ in telecinematic discourse evokes an addressee who is not spatiotemporally co-present with the text-world character. We therefore propose the concept of the split text-world, which assists in accounting for the deictic pull that viewers may feel during direct address and its experiential impact. Our analysis suggests that telecinematic direct address is necessarily world-forming but can ontologically position the viewer differently in different narrative contexts. While some instances of direct address in Fleabag position the viewer as Fleabag’s narratee and confidant, there is increasing play with direct address in the show’s second series and a destabilisation of this narratee role, achieved through the suggestion that Fleabag’s addressee may be more psychologically interior than they first appear.

Efficiency in discourse processing: Does morphosyntax adapt to accommodate new referents?

The introduction of new referents into discourse has traditionally been regarded as a major challenge to language processing, for which speakers deploy specific syntactic configurations, guided by the speaker’s assessment of the recipient’s state of mind (‘recipient design’). In this paper we probe these assumptions against discourse data from nine languages. We find little evidence for specialized syntactic configurations accommodating new referents; the only notable exception is the association of new reference with direct objects, suggests that linking new referents to already established discourse frames through a transitive construction is preferable to isolating them in an intransitive one. Where specific intransitive predicates are indeed found to host new referents, we find this to be motivated primarily by semantic considerations. Contrary to long-held assumptions, we conclude that the cognitive challenge of referent introduction is only weakly reflected in morphosyntax; instead, discourse production is most efficient when new referents are integrated seamlessly with content-driven demands of the narration.

Can discourse processing performance serve as an early marker of Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment? A systematic review of text comprehension

A number of linguistic and cognitive deficits have been reported during the course of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and its preceding stage of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), with some deficits appearing years before onset of clinical symptoms. It continues to be a critical task to identify tools that may serve as an early marker of pathology that are also reliably able to distinguish AD from normal ageing. Given the limited success of classic psychometric cognitive testing, a novel approach in assessment is warranted. A potentially sensitive assessment paradigm is discourse processing. The aim of this review was to synthesize original research studies investigating comprehension of discourse in AD and MCI, and to evaluate the potential of this paradigm as a promising avenue for further research. A literature search targeting studies with AD or MCI groups over 60 years of age was conducted in PubMed, Web of Science, and PsycINFO databases. Eight articles with good quality were included in the review. Six measures of discourse comprehension—naming latency, summary, lesson, main idea, proportion of inferential clauses, true/false questions—were identified. All eight studies reported significant deficits in discourse comprehension in AD and MCI groups on five of the six measures, when compared to cognitively healthy older adults. Mixed results were observed for associations with commonly used cognitive measures. Given the consistent findings for discourse comprehension measures across all studies, we strongly recommend further research on its early predictive potential, and discuss different avenues for research.

Extended Perspective Shift and Discourse Economy in Language Processing

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.