Which term best describes the understanding of the semantic relationships within a story?

The term that best describes the understanding of the semantic relationships within a story is representation. Representation in cognitive psychology refers to the way information is organized and understood in the mind. When we read or hear a story, we create mental models that encapsulate the main ideas, characters, events, and the relationships between them, enabling us to comprehend and recall the narrative effectively.

In contrast, parsing involves the process of breaking down sentences to understand their grammatical structure, which is essential for comprehension but focuses more on syntax than on semantic relationships. Statistical regularities refer to patterns and probabilities in language or behavior, which are useful for language processing but do not directly address the nuances of meaning within a specific narrative. Lexical priming pertains to how exposure to certain words can influence the processing of related concepts, which affects word recognition and retrieval rather than the overall understanding of a story’s semantic structure. Therefore, representation is the most fitting term to capture the holistic understanding of semantic relationships in narrative comprehension.