Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A model is described for question comprehension in which parsing, memory activation, identification and application of retrieval heuristics, and answer formulation are highly interactive processes operating in parallel. The model contfasts significantly with serial models in the literature, although it is more in line with parallel models of sentence comprehension. T w o experiments are described in support of the parallel view of question answering. In one, differential reading times for different question types were shown to be present only when subjects intended to answer the questions they were reading. In another, reading times for words in questions increased and answering times decreased when a unique answer could be identified early in the questions. The results suggest that source node activation and answer retrieval begin during parsing. Both symbolic and connectionist approaches to modeling question answering are potentially influenced by this perspxxtive.