Integration of Background Knowledge in Language Processing: A Unified Theory of Metaphor Understandi

One of the challenges of cognitive psychology is developing general models that explain a wide range of empirical phenomena. We describe a unique language comprehension model that ts data from several text comprehension domains: metaphor understanding, processing of semantic illusions and text memory. We show how background knowledge plays a similar role in all these processes, helping or hampering them. The model assumes that sentence processing at the semantic level is incremental, nondeterministic and incomplete , and uses background knowledge hints at each step. The model is implemented in the ACT-R framework (Anderson & Lebiere, 1998). The empirical phenomena that we model are: position eeects on metaphor understanding, innuence of distortion \quality" on semantic illusions and memory for related stories.

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