Dear Prof. Blustein- as I am not an official student of 6606, I cannot obtain the Chip server blog access. I figured it would be best to instead post it up on this preexisting blog of mine, that I had a brief interest in back in January.
Jonathan Chase here. I’ll get the ball rolling with the first blog entry regarding the reading. On Sept. 10th, I received the full outline and introductory reading pack for 6606, and started with Butcher and Kintsch’s “Text Comprehension and Discourse Processing”. I thought it was a great read to get “back in the swing” of reading articles and thinking critically for someone years removed from academia like myself, with subject matter discussing the mental mechanics of how we do precisely that. Internet reference was invaluable, with occasional breaks taken to acquaint myself with the meanings of unfamiliar but ultimately decipherable terms such as “schema”, “homograph”, “modus ponens” and “reified”.
Reading an article about how one reads an article was an interesting experience- one becomes hyper-sensitive to the context of every paragraph based on what you read in the paragraph before. While not impenetrably dense, I found the article slow reading due to stops for metacognition, and frequently found myself analysing (perhaps overanalysing) every nuance- for example, page 581 and 583’s passages regarding writing quality aiding recall lead to a tangent of judgement over the writing quality of the article itself. (In brief, it was “pretty good”.)
The passage on the Construction-Integration Model also struck home with me, and lending conscious thought to the truth that “for a very brief period both meanings of a homonym are activated under certain conditions” lead to an upsurge in seeing double entendre. The following statement that “construction processes during comprehension… are inherently promiscuous” (588) garnered a raised eyebrow, and when this was quickly followed by a paragraph opened with “bottom-up spreading” I couldn’t help but interpret it as an innuendo fit to set an entire ninth-grade class giggling.
This paragraph was the beginning of the passage regarding the “Collaborative Activation-Based Production System Architecture”, where the text veered into much deeper waters. The writer’s tone appeared to change at this point, (perhaps a baton was passed from Ms. Butcher to Mr. Kintsch or vice versa?) and examples seemed to go by wayside in favour of a thick jungle of jargon. My interest wavered and I suddenly became very aware that I was hungry, my knee was sore, and it was in the best interest of the Nation of Mali to annex the neighbouring Dutch.
An hour later I returned to the article, and attempted to comprehend this model. I will confess to having limited success- and that same metacognition lead me to a belief that my own capacity limits were straining on this particular theory, and in-class discussion may aid my own comprehension process. Ironically, it is this same feeling of being “overwhelmed” by the text that lead to a crude (and probably flawed) understanding of the concept of constrained working memory, and a relatively easier time comprehending the following segment regarding “The Capacity Constrained Construction Integration Model”, combining this difficult theory with the more comfortable concept of Construction-Integration.
I was struck by the value judgement that opened the Wordnet passage: “Wordnet is what a dictionary should be.”. It was the first and only statement of that nature in the article. Even in the next segment, regarding Latent Semantic Analysis, the authors refrained from offering approval or disapproval of the software being used for evaluation of grades, a loaded issue that seems to be just begging for value judgement one way or the other.
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