Abstract

This research investigates the processes by which individual sentence meanings combine into discourse meaning, by tracing the semantic integration process for verb meanings. Subjects heard stories which contained general verbs (e.g., “give”). For half of the subjects, additional semantic information was included in each story. The hypothesis was that this additional information would combine with the meanings of the general verbs to produce the meanings of more specific verbs (e.g., “pay”). In Experiments 1 and 2, subjects who had heard the extra material recalled and recognized these erroneous specific verbs often, while subjects who had not heard the extra material remembered the general verbs. These results are interpreted as providing evidence for integration of the semantic components of verbs from different parts of the passage. However, Experiment 3 revealed differences in the strength of the effect due to the order of presentation of general verb and inserted material. This asymmetry ruled out a s...