It's about time

Temporal aspects of cognitive processes in text production
Erscheinungsjahr 1996
ISBN: 978-90-5183-947-0
Verlag: Brill | Rodopi

Buch, Englisch, Band 6, 354 Seiten, Format (B × H): 150 mm x 220 mm

Reihe: Utrecht Studies in Language and Communication

A central issue of cognitive studies of text production is "What goes on in people's minds when they produce a text?", "How do they plan the text?", "How do they decide in what order to express their thoughts?" In this volume, writers are followed in their footsteps during the moment-to-moment process of producing routine business letters. Their writing processes are explored in real time with the ultimate goal to contribute to a cognitive theory of text production. Such a theory should tell what kind of mental structures underly text production, how these structures are converted into coherent texts, and how this process is framed within real writing time.
The study starts from a large corpus of real-life text production processes. It combines methods to explore both process and product of text production. Processes are described by analyzing the pause patterns that emerge in the course of writing. Products are described by analyzing their hierarchical structure. Together, these descriptions yield several significant insights in the real time organization of cognitive processes in production.
The study can be characterized as a cognitive linguistic approach to text production. This volume will be of special interest to researchers in the field of (psycho-)linguistics, textlinguistics and cognitive science.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Schilperoord, Joost

Inhaltsverzeichnis

CHAPTER 1 TRACKING WRITING IN REAL TIME. 1 Introduction. 2 Pause patterns in written text production: research questions. 3 The cognitive status of pauses. 4 The Knowledge Telling model of writing. 5 Real-time research on text production. 6 Dictation as a mode of text production. 7 Overview. CHAPTER 2 KNOWLEDGE TELLING AS A COGNITIVE PROCESS. 1 Introduction. 2 Two models of composing. 3 Declarative knowledge components. 4 Human cognition and human cognitive processing: ACT* theory. 5 Production pauses in ACT*. 6 Routine letter production. 7 Conclusions. CHAPTER 3 THE DISTRIBUTION OF PAUSE TIME IN TEXT PRODUCTION. 1 General introduction. 2 Research questions. 3 Psycholinguistic research on pause patterns. 4 Sampling and preparation of materials. 5 Analysis I: proportions of pauses. 6 Analysis II: durations of pauses. 7 Analysis III: hierarchical and linear aspects of pause durations. 8 General discussion. CHAPTER 4 TEXT STRUCTURE AND WRITING PAUSES. 1 Introduction. 2 Text analysis and text production research. 3 The analysis of hierarchical text structure. 4 Pause patterns and hierarchical structure. 5 Sampling and preparation of materials. 6 Analyses. 7 Summary and conclusions. CHAPTER 5 TOWARDS AN ACCESSIBILITY THEORY OF TEXT PRODUCTION. 1 Introduction. 2 A theory of attention and processing hierarchical networks. 3 Additive structures in discourse. 4 Explaining pause time distribution. 5 Attention processes in causal structures. 6 Closing remarks. CHAPTER 6 PAUSES, SYNTACTIC SCHEMAS AND SENTENCE PRODUCTION. 1 Introduction. 2 Pausing data. 3 Incremental Procedural Grammar. 4 A Usage Based approach to the Mental Grammar. 5 The processing relevance of schemas. 6 Schema activation. 7 Concluding remarks. CHAPTER 7 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS. 1 Introduction. 2 Summary. 3 Some aspects of the scope of the study. 4 On the construct validity of pausological research on language production. 5 Reconstructing conceptual processes in text production. 6 Final remarks. Bibliography. Authors index.