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- Propositional density: cognitive impairment and agingPublication . Harrag, Chaimae; Sabil, Abdelkader; Conceição, Manuel Célio; Radvansky, Gabriel A.It is important to understand the relationship between cognitive abilities and language processing. Here, we explore a burgeoning area of research that harnesses semantic indices to predict cognitive impairment and track cognitive decline. One such index, propositional density, quantifies the information conveyed per language segment. Despite some variation stemming from methodological, sampling, and measurement differences, we suggest that propositional density has diagnostic and assessment value. This paper surveys existing studies that have used propositional density in the context of cognitive aging and impairment and offers some insights into the use of this index to highlight differences in cognition. We also suggest further explorations of basic research involving this concept, and some applications for assessing cognitive health.
- Too dense to comprehend—or perfectly packed? the divergent effects of propositional density on levels of text memoryPublication . Harrag, Chaimae; Sabil, Abdelkader; Radvansky, Gabriel A.; Conceição, Manuel CélioPropositional density, a semantic index, calculates the number of idea units within a sentence. While research has shown that propositional density can influence comprehension, its effects on different levels of memory representation, namely, the surface form, textbase, and situation model, remain unexplored. The current study examined how varying levels of propositional density of the context on which target sentences were embedded affected memory at these different levels of representation. A sample of 120 native English speakers read historical texts with either low or high propositional density and then completed recognition tasks targeting each level. Our results indicated that lower propositional density improved memory for the surface form, while higher density enhanced memory for the textbase. Propositional density had no meaningful effect on the situation model level. These findings suggest a complex relationship between propositional density and memory: Higher density appears to impair memory at the surface form level but may create a desirable difficulty to strengthen memory at the textbase level. However, comprehension, as reflected by the situation model level, remains largely unaffected, suggesting that global comprehension relies more on coherence-building and prior knowledge integration than on local semantic density. These findings inform models of discourse processing and have implications for text design, instructional strategies, and cognitive load management in reading comprehension.