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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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