Interactive Activation Models of Perception and Comprehension.

Abstract : The objective of this research is to construct a computationally sufficient, biologically plausible, and behaviorally adequate account of human information processing skills in visual and auditory language processing. We have the following specific research goals for our contract: (1) To implement a model of reading printed text through a series of fixations. The model is intended to account for the integration of visual information over successive fixations, and the interaction of visual and contextual information in reading. (2) To implement a new version of our model of speech perception (TRACE), using programmable connections to allow the model to tune itself, in the course of processing, to changes in global parameters such as rate. This new model (which we will call the Programmable TRACE) is intended to account for human sensitivity to global as well as local contextual influences on the speech signal while retaining all the virtures of the present version of TRACE. (3) To begin work on the development of simulation models designed to capture aspects of interactions between lexical, syntactic, and semantic constraints on the construction of syntactic and functional representations of sentences.