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My primary research
interest is in language comprehension. More specifically, I am interested
in how memory is used during reading, particularly during the reading of
narratives. For most skilled readers, the process of comprehension often
seems effortless. Nevertheless, the memory processes that underlie
comprehension—the encoding, storage, organization, and retrieval of
information—are complex and dynamic, and pose a significant challenge for
theoretical accounts of comprehension.
Two major lines of
research are ongoing in my lab. The first surrounds the general question
of how readers represent individual and multiple entities (people and
objects) in narratives, how they select which entities to attend to,
which to ignore, and how they understand expressions like pronouns and
definite noun phrases (e.g., "the fruit") that refer to those
entities. One set of ongoing experiments is designed to examine how
negated entities (e.g., "Justin bought an apple but not a
mango.") are represented, with a focus on whether these entities are
somehow deleted or suppressed in the mind of the reader. Another current
set of experiments is designed to examine how quantified expressions
(e.g., "few survived" vs. "a few survived") are
understood, with an emphasis on the whether the context in which such
expressions appear alters understanding of quantifiers.
The second major line
of research surrounds the general question of the representation of the
situations described in narratives. One set of experiments is designed to
examine how the passage of narrative time (e.g., "A few minutes
later" vs. "A day later") affects how much readers attend
to the goals that narrative characters pursue; in particular, do readers
focus greater attention on unfulfilled goals as time passes? Another
series of experiments was recently started to investigate the kinds of
predictions that readers make during comprehension of narratives.
Representative
Publications:
Levine, W. H., Guzmán,
A. E., & Klin, C. M. (2000). When anaphor resolution fails. Journal of Memory and Language, 43,
594-617.
Levine, W.H., &
Klin, C.M. (2001). Tracking of spatial information in narratives. Memory & Cognition, 29,
327-335.
Gordon, P. C.,
Hendrick, R., & Levine, W. H. (2002). Memory-load interference in
syntactic processing. Psychological
Science, 13, 425-430.
Weingartner, K. M.,
Guzmán, A. E., Levine, W. H., & Klin, C. M. (2003). When throwing a
vase has multiple consequences: Minimal encoding of predictive
inferences. Discourse Processes, 36,
131-146.
Klin, C. M.,
Weingartner, K. M., Guzmán, A. E., & Levine, W. H. (2004). Readers'
sensitivity to linguistic cues in narratives: How salience influences
anaphor resolution. Memory &
Cognition, 32, 511-522.
*Hagaman, J. A., &
Levine, W. H. (under review). Individual differences in working memory
span and attentional resource allocation.
Levine, W. H., &
*Hagaman, J. A. (in preparation). Negated concepts interfere with anaphor
resolution.
Levine, W. H.,
*Hagaman, J. A., *Bogulski, C. A., *Green, R. R., & *Ortigo, D. S.
(2005) Attention-focusing by mass-noun quantifiers in sentence
comprehension. Poster presented at the 18th Annual CUNY Sentence
Processing Conference, Tucson, AZ.
Levine, W. H.,
*Hagaman, J. A., *Bogulski, C. A., *Green, R. R., & *Ortigo, D. S.
(2005) The effect of narrative time shifts on the representation of
goal-related information. Poster to be presented at the 45th Annual
Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Toronto, ON.
* Indicates student
co-author
Useful Links:
Language
Processing Lab
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