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The Formation of Belief 299

the discourse, but not the one the author had in mind. The intended message
is distorted by being assimilated into the reader’s prior concepts and beliefs.
Assimilation occurs because discourse comprehension, perception and
reasoning are interpretive processes, and interpretation is always a matter
of choice. The choices are based on the recipient’s prior knowledge. For the
sake of brevity, i develop the argument for discourse comprehension only, but
it holds equally for perception and reasoning. in discourse comprehension,
choices occur at the word, sentence and discourse levels. Consider lexical
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access, the activation of the meaning of a word. A large proportion of words are
polysemous; that is, they are used to express multiple meanings. For example,
the word “line” can refer to a cashier queue, a fishing tool or something drawn
with a pencil, among other things. When the word “line” is encountered, all
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its meanings are activated in parallel. To identify the intended meaning, the
recipient draws as much on knowledge of the world as on knowledge of lan-
guage. For example, if a word like “river” occurs in the same context, it will
support the interpretation of “line” as fishing line and suppress the alternative
interpretation cashier line, while words like “groceries” and “store” would sup-
port the latter over the former; see Figure 9.1. What a word is taken to mean
depends, in part, on the hearer’s prior knowledge, in this case that fishing lines
are used near the shores of lakes and that people often stand in line in grocery
stores.
Consider next parsing, the process of deciding how the words in a
sentence are related to each other. it, too, is dependent on world knowledge.
Word forms, word order, prepositions and punctuation convey information
about how words are meant to be connected, but this information may or
may not be sufficient, as illustrated by the following example sentence: The
spy saw the man with the binoculars. Who owns the binoculars, the spy or the
spy-ee? it could be either. Knowledge about how the world works immedi-
ately settles this question for the structurally similar sentence, the bird saw the
man with the binoculars. A bird, lacking the inclination to spy on others, is an
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unlikely owner of a pair of binoculars. The choice of interpretation depends
on knowledge about birds, not about language.
sentences have to be related to each other for one to make sense out of
a discourse. To turn to another stock example of the cognitive lecture hall, if
we read that three turtles are resting on a log and that a fourth turtle is swim-
ming below it, we do not hesitate to infer the location of the fourth turtle in
relation the first three. The knowledge that is operating in this case is quite
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abstract: the transitivity of spatial relations like above and below. specifically,
if X is above Y, and Y is above Z, then X is above Z as well. implicit bridging