Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We present a new version of the Syntagmatic-Paradigmatic model (SP; Dennis, 2005) as a representational substrate forencoding meaning from textual input. We depart from the earlier SP model in three ways. Instead of two multi-tracememory stores, we adopt an auto-associative network. Instead of treating a sentence as the unit of representation, we godown a scale to the level of words. Finally, we specify all stages of processing within a single architecture. We showhow the model is capable of forming representations of words that are independent of the surface-form through somequestion-answering examples. We end with a discussion of how the current model can provide a mechanistic account ofelaborative and inferential processes during comprehension.