Inferences in the Comprehension of Language (original) (raw)

2013, Research on Humanities and Social Sciences

Previous research in experimental psychology and artificial intelligence (AI) states that listeners and readers make many inferences in their attempts to understand oral and written discourse. This paper tries to explore the types of inference listeners / readers make to understand language. It also investigates the role of each type in the course of understanding a text. Ke : Inferences , Comprehension , Artificial Intelligence , Psycholinguistic Theories Introduction Inferences serve a variety of functions in language comprehension. The main function of inference is linking information from different parts of a text in order to establish its literal meaning. Among other things, they can be used to identify an unclearly pronounced word, to resolve a lexical ambiguity, to determine the referent of a pronoun, and to compute an intended message from a literal meaning. To some extent, exploring the inferences listeners / readers make and their roles in the comprehension of language comes from common sense and from research in experimental psychology and artificial intelligence(AI). Garnham (1989) states that although there is some truth in answers from these sources, they are to a greater or lesser extent misleading. Common sense is never a very good source of psycholinguistic theories because we simply do not have conscious access to most of the processes of language understanding. Since the discourse analyst, like the hearer / reader, has no direct access to a speaker's / writer's intended meaning in producing a text, he often has to rely on a process of inference to arrive at an interpretation for oral and written texts or for connections between utterances / sentences. Inferences that achieve the coherence of the representation by making backward links are deductive inferences made during reading, whereas inferences that do not create coherence, often