35 - Sentence processing and memory representation in Korean

Summary

Introduction

When readers comprehend a sentence, they construct coherent mental models in memory. The mental models of sentences include various components: semantic roles, syntactic positions, pragmatic order, and so on. These components influence each other in order to construct a mental model of a sentence. One of the most important questions in the field of the psychology of language is how these components contribute to the representation and processing of a sentence.

Gernsbacher (1990) proposed a general cognitive framework to explain the process and representation of skilled language comprehension, called the Structure Building Framework (hereafter SBF). The SBF has three component processes: laying the foundation, mapping, and shifting. These processes operate with the incoming language information to build a mental model of a sentence. Gernsbacher claimed that these processing mechanisms could be applied to any information beyond language. The most important principle of laying the foundation is the advantage of ‘first mention’. This effect was obtained consistently in English using several variations of sentences. Based on the laying of the foundation, the activation of incoming information transmits a processing signal to enhance or suppress previous information. The processes develop a mental model by mapping and shifting for coherence between new and old information. The SBF has been supported by many empirical findings (see Gernsbacher, 1997).

The important question is whether the advantage of first mention is a universal phenomenon across languages or is applicable only to specific languages.