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300 Conversion

Working fishing-line river catch salmon
memory:

Semantic
memory:
fishing
line river
cashier
line
salmon

Sensory
memory: ... “line” ... “river” ... “salmon” ...

Text: “Eager to be the first to catch a salmon, the children
ran down to the river and prepared their lines.”

Excitatory link
Inhibitory link
Figure 9.1. Meaning disambiguation at the word level. The auditory (or visual)
form of the content words appears in sensory memory in the order in which they are
encountered. solid arrows symbolize excitatory relations, the dashed arrow an inhibi-
tory relation.

inferences of this sort are carried out at a high rate while we are reading and
listening and they are knowledge dependent.
The strong and necessary role of prior knowledge in discourse compre-
hension has the peculiar consequence that the recipient of a discourse con-
tributes as much to its meaning as the writer or speaker. The recipient has
no direct access to what is in the speaker’s or writer’s head, so it is the recipi-
ent’s own prior knowledge that determines the interpretation. This fact spells
trouble for the processing of contradictory information: if readers or listeners
contribute much to the meaning of the discourse, the message they extract
from it will unavoidably be consistent with what they believe. This severely
limits the power of discourse to alter a person’s beliefs.
As an example, consider the question of the shape of the earth. if a child
believes that the earth is like a plane surface extending in all directions, and
a parent, teacher or other authority figure tells the child, the Earth is round,
then what happens? it would seem as if the child should take the adult at his