Cognitive Processes in Audience Decision Making 115example, for most audience members simultaneously reading a newspaper and listening to the news
on TV requires extraordinary effort.^96
Finally, it is important to note that not all of the information an audience attends to dur-ing reading or listening comes from sensory inputs such as the written words in a professional’s
document or the spoken words of a presentation. Audience members can also attend to infor-
mation coming from nonsensory sources. For example, audiences may access information from
their own long-term memories to use in decision making as when something a professional says
reminds them of an important concept. When consumers retrieve comparative product informa-
tion from their memories, the information actually has a stronger effect on their decisions than
comparative product information provided to them by external sources.^97 In addition to recalling
information, the audience may also generate information during the decision-making process,
such as when they evaluate and make inferences about the information they have seen or heard.^98
Sentence-Level Comprehension
The Sentence Comprehension Process
An audience’s process for comprehending sentences involves three overlapping and parallel subpro-
cesses: syntactic analysis , semantic analysis , and the construction of a referential representation or mental
image of the meaning of each sentence.^99
The fi rst subprocess, syntactic analysis, inputs individual words from the sentence whosemeanings have already been accessed during perception and outputs the grammatical role each
word plays in that sentence. For instance, in the sentence “The board promoted the CFO,” The
board would be recognized (albeit not consciously) as a determiner and noun that constitute
the subject of the verb, promoted would be recognized as the verb, and the CFO recognized as a
determiner and noun that constitute the object noun phrase. In a study that demonstrates the
importance of syntactic analysis to sentence comprehension, readers were presented with sen-
tences to read either one phrase, or syntactic unit, at a time or one randomly divided segment
of a sentence at a time. Readers had signifi cantly better comprehension of the sentences when
they read them one phrase at time.^100
The second subprocess, semantic analysis, inputs the syntax of the sentence as well as the mean-ing of the verb. It outputs the conceptual relationships, or case roles, of the words and phrases in
the sentence.^101 For instance, in the sentence “The board promoted the CFO,” The board would be
recognized as the agent, promoted as the action, and the CFO as the object of the action. In essence,
semantic analysis determines who is doing what to whom. Readers can sometimes bypass the
syntactic analysis process if semantic cues are suffi cient to provide them with the meaning of the
sentence.^102
The third subprocess, the construction of a referential representation, inputs the syntax andsemantics of the sentence and outputs a mental image of the actual or imaginary objects and
actions referred to in the sentence. The same sentence may have only one syntactic and semantic
representation but several different referential representations. As cognitive scientists Marcel Just
and Patricia Carpenter explain, the sentence “He fl ew to Cairo,” could have three different refer-
ential representations depending on how the person who is referred to fl ew: on a jet; in an antique
biplane; or on a magic carpet.^103 When a sentence contains a pronoun, referential processing iden-
tifi es any antecedent words to which the pronoun refers as well.
Brain Regions Activated. Syntactic analysis of both spoken and written sentences takes place intwo regions of the brain’s left hemisphere: Broca’s area in the left frontal lobe and a region of the left