A very different perspective on linguistic processing was proffered in the early years by researchers who took their cue from ideas about associative processes in the brain. For example, M. Ross Quillian (1968) proposed a model of word sense disambiguation based on “spreading activation” in a network of concepts (typically corresponding to senses of nouns) interconnected through relational links (typically corresponding to senses of verbs or prepositions). Variants of this “semantic memory” model were pursued by researchers such as Rumelhart, Lindsay and Norman (1972), and remain as an active research paradigm in computational models of language and cognition. Another psychologically inspired line of work was initiated in the 1960s and pursued for over two decades by Roger Schank and his associates, but in his case the goal was full story understanding and inferential question answering. A central tenet of the work was that the representation of sentential meaning as well as world knowledge centered around a few (e.g., 11) action primitives, and inference was driven by rules associated primarily with these primitives; (a prominent exponent of a similar view was Yorick Wilks). Perhaps the most important aspect of Schank's work was the recognition that language understanding and inference were heavily dependent on a large store of background knowledge, including knowledge of numerous “scripts” (prototypical ways in which familiar kinds of complex events, such as dining at a restaurant, unfold) and plans (prototypical ways in which people attempt to accomplish their goals) (Schank &amp; Abelson 1977).