Two experiments were conducted to assess the effects of various constraints on the processing of jokes. Participants read humorous jokes and nonhumorous alternatives of the jokes, which were presented in 3 conditions that manipulated discourse context (comedy, political, and control). In Experiment 1, participants rated the funniness of texts and…

This study addresses the need in discourse psychology for computational techniques that analyze text on multiple levels of cohesion and text difficulty. Discourse psychologists often investigate phenomena related to discourse processing using lengthy texts containing multiple paragraphs, as opposed to single word and sentence stimuli.…

During the last decade, interdisciplinary researchers have developed technologies with animated pedagogical agents that interact with the student in language and other communication channels (such as facial expressions and gestures). These pedagogical agents model good learning strategies and coach the students in actively constructing knowledge…

Discourse comprehension theories frequently assume that discourse comprehension involves a complete analysis of lexical, syntactic, semantic, and discourse levels of processing. However, discourse psychologists have documented some conditions when a partial processing and underspecification of the resulting representations occurs. The articles in…