ABSTRACT
Event and episode models are constructed spontaneously in the course of comprehending information about social events. These processes are automatic. Try not to understand the statement, “The boy kicked the ball.” For a native English speaker, this is very difficult. However, the processes involved in comprehending such a statement, described in chapter 4, are obviously not sufficient to extract meaning from the information one receives. This is particularly true when the information is conveyed verbally. Many statements make use of terms with which the recipient is unfamiliar. Others appear anomalous upon first consideration. For example, statements such as “The haystack was important because the cloth would rip” can only be assigned meaning in the context of a larger body of knowledge (e.g., a discussion of the hazards of parachuting; cf. Bransford et al., 1972). When such statements are encountered, they are theoretically transmitted by the Comprehender to the Work Space with an indication that they cannot be understood, thus stimulating Executor-monitored comprehension processes.
