Radvansky G A, Gerard L D, Zacks R T, Hasher L
Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, East Lansing 48824.
Psychol Aging. 1990 Jun;5(2):209-14. doi: 10.1037//0882-7974.5.2.209.
Recent work suggests that formation and use of mental model (representations of situations described) is an integral part of discourse comprehension. In an experiment comparing younger and older adults on this aspect of text comprehension, subjects heard readings of a list of sentences and took a forced-choice recognition test. The test contained 2 types of distractors with an equal degree of verbatim similarity to the target sentences. One type described the same situation as the corresponding target sentence; the other did not. If mental models are an integral part of text representation formed at encoding, then a large number of confusions of the first, but not the second, type of distractor with the target sentence would be obtained. Younger and older adults showed this pattern to equal degrees. These data are consistent with those indicating that linguistic competence remains stable over the adult years (cf. Light, 1988).
近期的研究表明，心理模型（对所描述情境的表征）的形成与运用是语篇理解不可或缺的一部分。在一项针对年轻人和老年人在文本理解这一方面的对比实验中，受试者听取了一系列句子的朗读，并进行了强制选择识别测试。该测试包含两种与目标句子逐字相似程度相同的干扰项。一种干扰项描述的情境与相应的目标句子相同；另一种则不同。如果心理模型是编码时形成的文本表征的一个组成部分，那么就会出现大量第一种而非第二种干扰项与目标句子混淆的情况。年轻人和老年人在这一模式上表现出相同的程度。这些数据与那些表明语言能力在成年期保持稳定的数据一致（参见莱特，1988年）。
