Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Question answering involves several processes: representation of the question concept, identification of the question type, menwry search and/or inference generation, and output. Researchers tend to view these processes as stages and have developed primarily serial models of question-answering. Word-by-word reading times of questions, however, suggest that some processing is done in parallel. Questions were read more slowly but answered quicker when the question type was apparent from the first question word (the usual English construction of a question) when compared to cases when the question word came last Serial models can not explain such data easily. It is argued that the processes associated with a particular question type are active during processing of the question concept and that they can direct memory search during question parsing. Some parallel models of question answering consistent with the data are discussed.