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12 Watching the Brain Comprehend Discourse

When the first author (Morton Ann Gernsbacher) was in graduate school, she once sat in on an undergraduate entry-level cognition course to see how one of the department’s best teachers conveyed the excitement and exquisiteness of cognitive psychology to an audience of 19-year-olds. This professor began the first day by posing the following challenge: Imagine that you were sent to some faraway planet, and your mission on this planet was to discern the workings of a mysterious—at least to you—structure, what here on earth we might call a building. However, you were prohibited or otherwise unable to enter the structure. How would you discern what work went on inside the structure? With guidance, the students arrived at recommendations such as to first carefully observe what entered the structure, and then carefully observe what exited the structure, and from those observations infer what work must go on inside the structure. Thus, if one saw sheet metal, rubber, and glass entering the structure and one observed Subaru vehicles leaving the structure, one might infer something different than if one saw denim cloth, thread, and zippers entering the structure and men’s blue jeans coming out. At this point the professor skillfully introduced some of the rudimentary concepts of experimental design: How, if clever enough, one might manipulate certain aspects of the input to the structure while controlling as many extraneous variables as possible, then measure qualitatively or quantitatively the output and thereby allow sharper inferences of what type of work went on inside the structure. At this point students suggested other covert techniques, for example, sneaking in at night or some time when their presence would not be detected—in other words, observing the structure “at rest.” Trying to obtain a blueprint or floor plan of the structure was also suggested. Even bombing a section of the structure to see how that affects the output (an idea not so far