Modeling suppression in lexical access.

Abstract

Language can be viewed as a specialized skill involving language-specific pro­ cesses and language-specific mechanisms. In contrast, we view language as draw­ ing on many general cognitive processes and mechanisms. This chapter focuses on one general cognitive mechanism that appears to be crucial for successful language comprehension: the mechanism of suppression. The mechanism of suppression figures prominently in Gernsbacher's ( 1990, 1991a, 1995, 1997c) structure building framework for understanding language comprehension. According to the structure building framework, the goal of com­ prehension is to build coherent mental representations, or what we refer to as mental structures. These structures represent clauses, sentences, passages, or other meaningful units. In her previous research, Gernsbacher has demonstrated the crucial role that suppression plays in many structure building and language comprehension phenomena. These phenomena include lexical (how comprehenders understand or access the appropriate meanings of words; Faust & Gernsbacher, 1996; Gernsbacher & Faust, 1991b), anaphoric reference (how comprehenders understand to-whom or to-what anaphors, such as pronouns, refer; Carreiras & Gernsbacher, 1992; Gernsbacher, 1989, 1991b, 1997a; Oakhill, Gamham, Gernsbacher, & Cain, 1992), cataphoric reference (how words that are marked by devices, such as spoken stress, gain a privileged status in comprehenders' mental structures; Gernsbacher, 1989; Gernsbacher & Jescheniak, 1995; Gemsbacher & Shroyer, 1989), surface information loss (why seemingly superficial information, such as syntactic form, is forgotten more rapidly than seemingly deeper information, such as thematic content; Gemsbacher, 1985), inferencing (how comprehenders incorporate information into their mental structures that is only implied by a text or discourse; Beeman, Bowden, & Gernsbacher, 2000; Gemsbacher, 1991b, 1994a; Gemsbacher, Gold­ smith, & Robertson, 1992; Gernsbacher, Hallada, & Robertson, 1998; Gernsbacher & Robertson, 1992; Oakhill et al., 1992), general comprehension skill (which is skill at comprehending linguistic as well as nonlinguistic media;