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Celia Klin

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Few things are as fascinating, or as important, in people's lives as language. Language plays a central role in almost all aspects of our lives. And psycholinguistics involves the psychological study of language. In Klin's laboratory, they examine the cognitive processes that are involved in using and understanding language. More specifically, they examine the processes involved in understanding written language. Because language almost always involves units of language larger than an individual word or a single sentence, they focus on how people understand connected discourse, such as stories. In this work, they ask questions such as: What is the nature of the "memory representation" that readers create? That is, after reading a story (or an email or an essay) what information does the reader have stored in memory? And what are the cognitive processes involved in comprehension? In addition to contributing toward a theory of discourse, or text, processing, this work contributes to the study of a variety of basic cognitive processes such as memory and attention.

Some recent topics of investigation in Klin's lab: How skilled are readers at keeping track of story characters' perspective? What types of inferences do readers draw? How do readers represent the spatial information in stories? How does a change in context influence readers' memory for a story?

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  • Readers had superior memory for a list of words in story when the character committed themselves to remembering the list, rather than glancing at it quickly, even when the list was equally important to the plot in the two versions. Moreover, readers spent twice as long reading the list when the character attempted to commit the words to memory, compared with when the character merely glanced at the list.

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