What’s New? Acquiring New
Information as a Process in
Comprehension
Suan E. Haviland & Herbert H. Clark
Overview

Communication is a cooperative effort
between the speaker and listener. The
speaker’s purpose is to provide information
to his audience, the listener’s goal is to
extract the new information and integrate it
with old information already in memory.
 Given-New Strategy is a comprehension
strategy proposed by the authors.
Some Important Terms

Given Information = information that
speaker’s audience already knows
 New Information = information that
speaker’s audience does not know
 Antecedent = information already present in
memory i.e. given information has an
antecedent in memory
Predictions by Given-New Strategy
1. If the Given Information matches
something in context, that is, if it has an
Antecedent, the listener will be quick to
respond that he understands the sentence.
2. If the Given Information does not have a
matching Antecedent, the listener will be
slower to claim he comprehends the
sentence.
Experiment 1



Purpose: To test the predictions claimed by Given-New
Strategy
Procedure: Pairs of context & target sentences are
presented to subjects sequentially. The sentence pairs are
grouped into 2 types:
Direct Antecedent Pair
e.g. We got some beer out of
the trunk. The beer was
warm.

Indirect Antecedent Pair
e.g. We checked the picnic
supplies. The beer was
warm.
• Comprehension time of target sentence are measured.
Results:
Comprehension time:
Direct Antecedent Pairs: 835ms
Indirect Antecedent Pairs: 1016ms
Subjects responded on an average 181ms faster
towards the direct antecedent. This agreed with
the Given-New Strategy’s prediction.
YET, it can be argued that the results were due
to the simple facilitating effect of repetition.
Experiment 2

Purpose: To test if the results from exp. 1 are due
to the repetition of a noun
 Modification: DA pairs remained the same. IA
pairs were altered. The critical noun was repeated
in both sentence but it did not posit the existence
of the object being referred to in the context
sentence.
e.g. Ed wanted an alligator for his birthday. The
alligator was his favorite present.
Although the noun “alligator” was mentioned in both
context and target sentences, “the alligator” did
not have an antecedent to match up with. (in this
case, “an alligator” wasn’t the antecedent)
Results

Comprehension time:
 Direct Antecedent Pairs: 1031ms
 Indirect Antecedent Pairs: 1168ms
 Subjects responded on an average 137ms
faster towards the direct antecedent.

Repetition of the critical noun is not
enough to account for the comprehension
time difference.
Experiment 3

Purpose: To investigate the model with various
types of presupposition & what effect of negation
has on the process
 Presupposition: used adverbs e.g. still, either,
again, too
 Negative Antecedent: Given information is
expressed in negation in the context sentence.
(subjects had to deduce the meaning and therefore
required a longer comprehension time)
Experiment 3
The target sentences for DA, IA and NA
were identical. The only difference was in
the context sentences.
Predictions: Comprehension times for DA
should be shortest among the 3 pairs. No
direct relationship between IA and NA.
Results

Comprehension time:
 DA = fastest for all 4 adverbs
 IA, NA = roughly equal for all the adverbs
except ‘either’
Conclusion

According to Given-New Strategy, listeners break
sentences into Given & New information, and then
attempts to add New information to memory using the
Given information as a pointer to some Antecedent
already in memory.
 If no Antecedent is present, listeners must build some
sort of bridging structure, treat all information as new
and begin construction or a new structure, or attempt
to recompute what is Given and what is New in the
sentence.

Three layers of comprehension
1)Shallow = judge how comprehensible a sentence is
without actually comprehensing it fully
2)Deep = be able to comprehend a sentence without
relating it to context
3)Deepest = comprehend sentences with respect to
context
(assuming subjects used the 3rd level of comprehension)
Discussion
1.
The authors don't say much about the difference between
the Direct and Indirect Antecedents compared to Direct
and Negative Antecedents, they just state that Indirect
and Negative are equally slow compared to Direct.
However, aren't these differences caused by very
different processes? The whole argument behind the
Direct/Indirect Antecedent difference is that there is no
clear antecedent to which the new information may be
readily attached. but in the Negative Antecedent
condition, the antecedent exists, it is just in a less clear
form. Might the differences just be caused the amount
of time it takes to resolve 'not sober' and 'drunk' as the
same thing?
2. How or why might changing every definite article to an
indefinite article in Bransford and Franks' experiment have
affected their results?
3. How does the Given-New Strategy account for the results of
the Bransford and Johnson (1973) study? The authors didn't
explain this very well.
4. How would the comprehension times of the first sentence
compare with the comprehension of the second sentence?
5.Would this effect be seen in longer sentences that gave the old
and new information at once?
6.Other than acknowledging its existence, the authors seem to
pay little attention to the fact that some of these sentences can
have more than one meaning (Stephen can't dance the rhumba
either). What effect, if any, does that have on their results,
other than the fact that these may potentially take longer to
compute?
7. The idea of context in this paper seems to be representative
of something closer to memory of what we have previously
learned (something like pragmatics discussed in previous
papers). How does its implementation compare with that of
the use of context along with syntax in language
comprehension?
8. Is it possible to erase these connections between antecedents
and new information? For example, if you realize you
misinterpreted the given information and therefore attached
the new information to the wrong antecedent.
9. What about the times when you know you've learned
something before (so there would be an antecedent), but you
just can't remember it? Would you have to construct a new
antecedent since otherwise you would have nothing to attach
the new information to?
10. Could this result be replicated with subjects with damaged
short term memory? Are the authors arguing that this
given information has to be consciously known about
(explicit)?
11. I still don't quite understand how reliable their testing of
"understanding" was. Without a post-test of some sort, it
seems like the people could press the button whenever they
wanted?
12.Wouldn't your rate of reading affect these results? Some
people read things much faster than others, which would
lead to shorter response times because they would have
more time to interpret the sentence.
13.Is it common for a speaker to make an error regarding
what knowledge is 'given' between two people?
14. Are these effects seen in ASL as well?