About

Charles Fletcher is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota's College of Liberal Arts. His research addresses fundamental questions in discourse comprehension, focusing on how the meaning of a discourse is represented in memory and how that representation is constructed. He has demonstrated the existence of three levels of representation in memory for discourse: a surface level, a propositional textbase, and a situation model. His work explores the online processing of discourse, emphasizing the roles of memory and attention in understanding the causal structure of narratives. Fletcher's research involves constructing computer models to simulate the flow of ideas during narrative comprehension and conducting experiments with human subjects to evaluate these models. Recently, his research has expanded to investigate how syntactic and semantic factors influence attention, the generalizability of his findings to the comprehension of mathematical and logical proofs, and the effectiveness of computer software designed to improve reading comprehension. His educational background includes a Ph.D. obtained in 1984, and his specialties encompass mental representation of meaning, text comprehension, experimental discourse comprehension and production, and cognition related to causal reasoning and human memory.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Computer science
• Linguistics
• Cognitive psychology
• Cognitive science

Selected publications

• Do hallucinations exist on a continuum with subclinical hallucinatory experiences? A multi-method taxometric study

  Schizophrenia Research · 2025-05-23

  articleOpen access

  BACKGROUND: There remains a debate about whether symptoms of psychosis lie on a continuum with healthy functioning or exist separately and are taxonic. This issue has important implications for the classification, assessment and treatment of psychosis. Research has highlighted that some symptoms of psychosis, such as paranoia, have a dimensional latent structure but it remains to be seen whether this is true for other symptoms. AIM: To assess the latent structure of hallucinations in a diverse sample using taxometric methods. METHODS: Three taxometric procedures; MAMBAC, MAXEIG and L-MODE, were applied to a dataset of clinical (n = 290) and non-clinical (n = 1580) participants who had completed the Launay-Slade Hallucinations Scale- revised (LSHS-R). Analyses were initially conducted with a non-clinical group before a clinical group was included, increasing the likelihood of producing a pseudo-taxon. RESULTS: Three out of six taxometric analyses found a strong dimensional result (non-clinical sample; MAXEIG and L-Mode analyses. Whole sample; MAXEIG analysis). Two of the other three results were more in favour of a dimension (non-clinical sample; MAMBAC analysis and L-Mode analyses). The final analysis (whole sample; MAMBAC) supported neither a dimension nor a taxon. DISCUSSION: Despite some ambiguity in the findings, we observe some indications that hallucinations, like paranoia, could be dimensional, especially in the non-clinical sample. Clinical implications of these findings are discussed. Potential issues with the LSHS-R mean that results should be interpreted with some caution. The development of additional scales or assessments for hallucinations, expanding recruitment to more diverse non-clinical and clinical populations, is recommended.

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• The Regality Court and the Landed Estate

  2021-10-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Autonomic arousal in a foreign language in the context of decision making

  Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America · 2019-03-15

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We test emotional distancing in a second language (L2) by replicating an experiment by Keysar, Hayakawa, and An (2012) on making decisions under the framing effect (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979). With their participants’ average Age of Acquisition (AoA) being around and beyond puberty, autonomic arousal was evident in native language (L1) but absent in L2. Our study showed no difference between L1 and L2 when AoA was around 4. However, when average AoA was around 7.7, autonomic arousal was evident in L1 but absent in L2, predicting an AoA threshold affecting L2 affective processing significantly earlier than puberty.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Politics of Municipal Incorporation in South Florida

  Florida State University Journal of Land Use and Environmental Law · 2018-01-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In the past few years, more affluent unincorporated communities have chosen incorporation, particularly in South Florida. This Article addresses the recent incorporation phenomenon in Florida, examining the causes and effects of the movement. The first part of the Article provides background on the structure of Florida's local government system. Additionally, the Article discusses the advantages of incorporation to Florida's communities, explaining the impetus for this new trend. Next, the Article explores the revenue tax base erosion resulting from these recent incorporations and discusses other problems caused by the incorporation wave. Lastly, the Article presents potential options to assuage the incorporation crisis, examining the advantages and disadvantages of each of these proposals.

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• Reading comprehension in the early years: Making the case for oral language

  Dialnet (Universidad de la Rioja) · 2017-01-01

  articleSenior author
  Publisher

• Reading comprehension in the early years

  Studies in written language and literacy · 2017-05-15 · 2 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract The relation between comprehension and reading comprehension is strong at all ages and levels of proficiency. Even though there are reciprocal influences on one another, comprehension remains a strong predictor for reading comprehension performance across development. In this chapter, we will review current research advances on comprehension development, with an emphasis in the early years, specifically from preschool to early elementary school. We view comprehension as a multidimensional construct that includes broader oral language skills. This view has implications for the early diagnosis of comprehension difficulties, assessment of comprehension, and instruction of comprehension skills in the early years.

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• A Model of Narrative Comprehension and Recall

  2014-02-25 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  To a skilled reader, comprehension is a simple, even enjoyable, process. How­ ever, underlying this intuitively simple activity is a complex interaction of basic cognitive processes. In order to deal with this complexity, researchers have concentrated on some aspects of comprehension and ignored others. Consider, for example, the model of comprehension proposed by Kintsch and van Dijk (1978; van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983). This model focuses on the role of long-and short-term memory in comprehension, but ignores the fact that understanding a text is largely a problem-solving task. In contrast, Trabasso and van den Broek (1985; Trabasso & Sperry, 1985; van den Broek, 1988) have developed a model of comprehension that emphasizes the role of problem solving and ignores the constraints imposed by long-and short-term memory. The result is two models of comprehension that are intuitively appealing and have generated substantial empirical support, but that have so little in common that they are sometimes viewed as competing alternatives.

  PublisherDOI

• Allocation of Attention During Tagalog Sentence Comprehension

  2013-03-01

  article

  It has long been known that sentence comprehension is a fairly complex task because of how different sources of knowledge (i.e., syntactic, lexical, pragmatic, discourse, context) interact during sentence processing (Harrington, 2001). Despite this, most children can still master their native language by age 3 or 4. Sentence production and comprehension are even more remarkable when we consider human cognitive limitations, such as short-term working memory (Schacter, 2001). These limitations can cause difficulties in comprehension of sentences, but it is possible to compensate for this limitation within the language itself. A theoretical model of sentence processing and language acquisition called the Competition Model (MacWhinney & Bates, 1989) was developed in order to account for how the linguistic features of languages can help guide sentence comprehension despite the limitations of short-term working memory. The Competition Model assumes that lexical knowledge is emphasized as the main controller of parsing, processing, and acquiring language (MacWhinney, 1988). This basic tenet is compatible with the dominant view of current sentence processing research, which emphasizes the role of lexical knowledge in language processing (Ellis, 1998, 2002; Harrington, 2001). The model also draws on modeling and parameterized mathematical modeling as tools to account for input driven (MacWhinney & Pleh, 1997, p.70), which mirrors cognitive science's interest in connectionist models (Gasser, 1990) to map cognitive processes. Before expanding on the mechanisms behind the Competition Model, it is best to first understand the nature of the linguistic features that are used by the model to generate sentence comprehension. In every language, lexical items are connected to other lexical items by means of role relations. For instance, the verb functionally specifies two arguments (nominals). The first argument is the agent who does the action (e.g., John hits). The second argument involves the patient, or the entity affected or changed by the hitting action (e.g., hit the ball). The functional connections of these lexical items then specify the roles of (a) the action and the agent and (b) the action and the patient. Bates and MacWhinney (1982, 1987) posit that the statistical and informative properties of these linguistic features (ex. frequency and information value) have an important role during language processing and acquisition. Bates and MacWhinney (1989) quantify statistical and informative properties of linguistic features in the context of cue strength and cue validity within the Competition Model. Cue strength reflects a psychological and subjective property of a cue that the language learner or child develops. Of course, the strength of a similar cue varies from language to language (Clifton & Duffy, 2001). For instance, the first noun that appears before the verb in an English sentence is strongly associated with an agent, and thus it becomes the strong cue for an agent (Gernsbacher & Hargreaves, 1989). In Italian, on the other hand, the noun that appears before the verb in a sentence is more strongly associated with a topic than with an agent. Therefore, the strength of the preverbal position cue for an agent among English speakers is much greater than that among Italian speakers. On the other hand, cue validity is assumed to be the most predictive determinant of cue strength (Bates & MacWhinney, 1989). Cue validity is an objective property of the cue. Language learning is the process by which speakers assign and adjust cue strength (i.e., an individual's knowledge of cues) according to cue validity. One of the earliest tests of cue validity across languages was conducted by Bates and MacWhinney (1984). The methodology used in this study was an agent-identification task in which the native English, German, and Italian speaker is presented with simple transitive sentences consisting of two nouns and a verb. …

• Discourse Comprehension

  2012-12-06 · 104 citations

  bookSenior author

  This volume is derived from presentations given at a conference hosted in Boulder, Colorado in honor of the 60th birthday of Walter Kintsch. Though the contents of the talks, and thus the chapters, varied widely, all had one thing in common -- they were inspired to some degree by the work of Walter Kintsch. When making plans for an edited book centered around this conference, the editors had a primary goal: to acknowledge the wide variety of researchers and research areas Kintsch had influenced. As a consequence, one of the more unusual elements of this volume is the diversity of the contributors. Researchers from six different countries contributed chapters to this book which is loosely organized around three main thrusts of Kintsch's work: * text-based representations that explain how meaning in a text is constructed, * situation models which represent what the text is about rather than what a text literally says, and * the construction-integration model, Kintsch's most recent work in discourse comprehension.

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• Neural oscillations associated with the primacy and recency effects of verbal working memory

  Neuroscience Letters · 2010-02-21 · 14 citations

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Frequent coauthors

• Richard C. Brundage

  University of Minnesota

  102 shared

• Mark W. Kline

  Tulane University

  89 shared

• Edward P. Acosta

  Cystic Fibrosis Foundation

  80 shared

• Anthony T. Podany

  University of Nebraska Medical Center

  73 shared

• Nancy R. Calles

  Texas Children's Hospital

  68 shared

• Patricia DeLora

  NorthBay Healthcare

  61 shared

• Karin Jorga

  61 shared

• Heidi Schwarzwald

  Hartford Financial Services (United States)

  61 shared

Awards & honors

• Faculty Summer Research Fellowship, University of Minnesota…
• College of Liberal Arts Teaching Award, University of Minnes…
• Bush Faculty Development Program on Excellence and Diversity…
• McKnight-Land Grant Professorship, University of Minnesota (…
• Highest Honors in Psychology, University of California (1977…