Discourse Comprehension Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

La presente investigación tiene como objetivo determinar el nivel de comprensión que logran los estudiantes universitarios de una carrera de Pedagogía en Castellano de una universidad del Consejo de Rectores de la Zona Central cuando se enfrentan a la lectura de textos del área de la lingüística con predominancia de distintos sistemas semióticos. Para lograr este objetivo se diseñaron dos pruebas de comprensión, una con predominancia del sistema semiótico verbal y otra con predominancia del sistema gráfico las que, luego de ser validadas y pilotadas, se aplicaron a 60 alumnos universitarios de la carrera ya mencionada. Tomando como base el modelo de van Dijk & Kintsch (1983) y el modelo de comprensión multimodal de Schnotz (2005), ambas pruebas apuntan a medir la comprensión en diferentes niveles. Los resultados de esta investigación arrojan que la predominancia de distintos sistemas semióticos en la lectura de textos del área de lingüística no incide significativamente en los niveles de logro de los estudiantes investigados.

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- Multimedia, Multimedia Learning, Reading Comprehension, Discourse Comprehension

Bibliografía: La investigación en comprensión lectora en Chile (2000-2015) v.2 Esta bibliografía presenta un listado de la literatura reciente en relación con la investigación en comprensión lectora en Chile. Nos centramos principalmente en artículos de revistas indexadas en WOS, EBSCO y Scielo, publicados entre los años 2000-2015. Tomamos como criterio los artículos que informan sobre estudios realizados en Chile o que emanan desde centros de investigación chilenos en el área de comprensión lectora como L1. Abarcamos investigaciones cualitativas, cuantitativas, revisiones bibliográficas y trabajos conceptuales. Es nuestra intención extender el alcance de esta bibliografía de modo de incluir libros, capítulos de libros, artículos publicados en revistas no indexadas y tesis. Agradeceremos las contribuciones enviadas en respuesta a la publicación de la versión anterior de la presente bibliografía.

- by Violeta Cautin-Epifani and +1
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- Reading, Chile, Reading Comprehension, Chilean Spanish

The global aim of the present research paper is an attempt to reach a threshold level of the learning of a foreign language (English) through the development of vocabulary. Observing the very limited rate of use of English in the Algerian community, English as Foreign Language (EFL) students, actually, need to progress in the mastery of that language by reading and/or listening to texts or messages intensively. To achieve this goal, subsequent procedures should take place by giving the foreign language a rather more appreciable position in the community such as the one held by a second language. To be down-to-earth, a brief survey on the linguistic situation in Algeria is exposed where neat clarification of second-foreign language status in the community is laid out to show that the more a (foreign) language is explicitly exposed in its manifold forms, the more are learners, in that community, likely to acquire it as a second language. However, the assumption of presenting the receptive skills (reading and listening) as the most appropriate means for the growth of foreign language vocabulary is supported by Krashen's input theory where any input to be understood, should come at EFL learners' capacity to read/listen and decode easily the meaning. In due course, First year EFL students have been subject to a language proficiency test-'a pre-test then a post-test'. This typical experimental design is an intervention study which contains two groups: 'the treatment or experimental' group which receives the treatment, or which is exposed to some special conditions of intensifying vocabulary learning through a varied, comprehensible input; and a second group of EFL learners-the control group-whose role is to provide a baseline. The findings showed better scores among the experimental group compared to the other group. Actually, the results proved the adequacy of the adopted theory.

We investigated the role of global discourse organization on the comprehension of temporal order in narrative. We proposed three principles of discourse organization: (a) the immediate integration principle--- new event should be integrated immediately with old information, (b) the consistency principle---a new event should be attached to a consistent locus, and (c) the isomorphism principle---discourse structure should match event structure. Five passages varying in discourse structure were presented auditorily, and the comprehension of the underlying event order was tested. Subjects' comprehension was best in the canonical passage. The backward, flashback, and embedded passages were significantly more difficult than the canonical passages. The flashforward passage was the most difficult. The results were interpreted as showing that the immediate integration principle is a strong component of comprehension of temporal order and that the isomorphism principle contributes to tex...

- by Keis Ohtsuka
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- Discourse Analysis, Cognitive Science, Higher Education, Reading Comprehension
- by Jung-Mo Lee
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- Inference, Discourse Comprehension, Discourse Processing, Text Processing
- by Brock Dubbels
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- Literacy, Game studies, Media Studies, Design

This article focuses on strategies of discourse processing for the relay of Vedic truth-statements (mahāvākyas) in the context of globalization and secular modernity. Of primary interest is situational representation of communicative events and educational reforms surrounding the transmission of brahmajñāna, that is, knowledge (jñāna) of nondual reality (brahman). Culminating at the end of the Vedas, Upaniṣads codify contextual properties of teacher-student successions (guru-śiṣya-paramparās) structuring the transmission of brahmajñāna. Despite ongoing interest in Advaita Vedānta, there is still a need to conceptualize the teaching tradition (sampradāya) as a matter for empirical observation and thereby to propose a set of cognitive hypotheses that make it possible to account for the referential basis of discourse production and situation models representing Upaniṣads as a verbal means of knowledge (śabda-pramāṇa). Consequently, genre expectations in the Advaita sampradāya provide the starting point for further inquiry into variant discourses of Vedānta.

- by Travis Webster
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- Discourse Analysis, Semiotics, Religion, Hinduism

Research in text comprehension has provided details as to how text features and cognitive processes interact in order to build comprehension and generate meaning. However, there is no explicit link between the cognitive processes deployed during text comprehension and their place in higher-order cognition, as in problem solving. The purpose of this paper is to propose a cognitive model in which text comprehension is made analogous to a problem solving situation and that relies on current research on well-known cognitive processes such as inference generation, memory, and simulations. The key characteristic of the model is that it explicitly includes the formulation of questions as a component that boosts representational power. Other characteristics of the model are specified and its extensions to basic and applied research in text comprehension and higher-order cognitive processes are outlined.

- by Jazmín Cevasco
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- Causal Inference, Problem Solving, Discourse Comprehension

Discourse comprehension involves the establishment of semantic or meaningful causal connections. The aim of this paper is to review four models that have contributed to the study of the establishment of these connections: the Causal Chain Model, the Causal Network Model, the Causal Inference Maker, and the Landscape Model. These models contribute to the facilitation of student learning, given that they provide useful tools for improvement of texts structure in order to promote
the establishment of meaningful connections and the revision of students’ prior incorrect ideas, and for the design of interventions that promote the generation of inferences and the monitoring of comprehension. The presentation of their key ideas, of empirical support for their psychological validity, and of applications to education will allow us to highlight the contributions that these models make to our understanding of the importance of the processing of causality for
discourse comprehension and the facilitation of student learning.

- by Jazmín Cevasco
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- Teaching and Learning, Education, Discourse Comprehension

Niveles de comprensión y su relación con la predominancia de sistemas semiótico en textos del área de la lingüística. Una aproximación al fenómeno multimodal desde el discurso académico universitario: Este trabajo investigativo pretende determinar los niveles de comprensión que alcanzan los estudiantes de pregrado por medio de la lectura de textos multisemióticos propios de la disciplina de lingüística. Para alcanzar este objetivo, nos centraremos en determinar los niveles de comprensión de alumnos y alumnas de la carrera de Castellano y Comunicación de PUCV a través de una prueba de comprensión en la que se considerará la presencia de artefactos multisemióticos en textos disciplinares propios del área de la lingüística. Los resultados de esta investigación permitirán aportar datos relevantes a los estudios empíricos multimodales y, en especial, a las investigaciones relacionadas con géneros discursivos.

Este artículo describe los resultados obtenidos en una investigación que indaga en los niveles de comprensión lectora en estudiantes universitarios al leer textos de su área de especialidad (lingüística). Para lograr este objetivo se diseñaron dos pruebas de comprensión que, luego de ser validadas y pilotadas, se aplicaron a 60 alumnos universitarios de Pedagogía en Lengua y Literatura de una universidad de la zona central perteneciente al Consejo de Rectores. Tomando como base el modelo de van Dijk & Kintsch (1983), estas pruebas apuntan a medir la comprensión discursiva de dichos alumnos en diferentes niveles: coherencia microestructural, coherencia mesoestructural, coherencia macroestructural y modelo de situación. Los resultados de esta investigación arrojan un nivel de logro general bajo, que no supera el 60% y que disminuye en las tareas que apuntan a niveles de comprensión más profunda. El artículo concluye con una reflexión en torno a la necesidad de crear programas universitarios que se enfoquen en el desarrollo de habilidades de comprensión discursiva de textos especializados.

- by Violeta Cautin-Epifani and +1
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- Reading Comprehension, Academic discourse, Multimodality, Discourse Comprehension

This study investigated the role of working memory capacity on the making of reinstatement and causal elaborative inferences during the reading of natural texts. In order to determine participants' working memory capacity, they were asked to take the reading span task before they took part in the study. Those participants that were identified as high or low working memory capacity readers were asked to perform a lexical decision task in two conditions: pre-inference and inference. In the pre-inference condition, target words representing reinstatement or causal elaborative inferences were presented immediately before the sentences that were predicted to prompt them. In the inference condition, the target words were presented immediately after the sentences that were predicted to prompt the inferences. Results indicated that, for the high working memory capacity readers, lexical decision times were faster at the inference compared to the pre-inference locations for both types of inferences. In the case of low working capacity readers, lexical decision times were faster at the inference compared to the preinference locations only for reinstatement inferences. These findings suggest that working memory capacity plays a role in the making of causal inferences during the comprehension of natural texts.

- by Jazmín Cevasco
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- Reading, Causal Inference, Discourse Comprehension, Lectura
- by Jazmín Cevasco
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- Discourse Analysis, Spoken discourse, Discourse Comprehension, Causal Connections

This study concerns the mechanisms involving temporal update in discourse
comprehension, comparing traditional approaches based on Aktionsart and
Iconicity against an approach based on narrative expectations. Our experiments
suggest that readers pay more attention to fine-grained discourse properties (such as
salient temporal boundaries and event complexity) pertaining to the eventualities
they encounter in the narrative in determining whether narrative time will be moved
or not as opposed to strictly adhering to coarse-grained defaults imposed by
Aktionsart and Iconicity. These results suggest a more active view of discourse
comprehension, where readers actively generate expectations about when the next mentioned
eventuality is likely to take place.

- by Jean-Pierre Koenig
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- Narrative Analysis, Discourse Comprehension, Iconicity, Aktionsart

Using a novel adaptation of the visual world eye-tracking paradigm we investigated children's and adults' online processing of reference in a naturalistic language context. Participants listened to a 5-minute long storybook while wearing eye-tracking glasses. The gaze data were analyzed relative to the onset of referring expressions (i.e., full noun phrases (NPs) and pronouns) that were mentioned throughout the story. We found that following the mention of a referring expression there was an increase in the proportion of looks to the intended referent for both children and adults. However, this effect was only found early on in the story. As the story progressed, the likelihood that participants directed their eye gaze towards the intended referent decreased. We also found differences in the eye gaze patterns between NPs and pronouns, as well as between children and adults. Overall these findings demonstrate that the mapping between linguistic input and corresponding eye movements is heavily influenced by discourse context.

- by Monique Charest and +1
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- English, Pronouns, Eye-tracking, Spoken discourse
- by Jazmín Cevasco and +1
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- Discourse Markers, Reading, Causality, Discourse Comprehension

Social psychologists have shown experimentally that implicit race bias can influence an individual’s behavior. Implicit bias has been suggested to be more subtle and less subject to cognitive control than more explicit forms of racial prejudice. Little is known about how implicit bias is manifest in naturally occurring social interaction. This study examines the factors associated with physicians selecting children rather than parents to answer questions in pediatric interviews about routine childhood illnesses. Analysis of the data using a Generalized Linear Latent and Mixed Model demonstrates a significant effect of parent race and education on whether physicians select children to answer questions. Black children and Latino children of low-education parents are less likely to be selected to answer questions than their same aged white peers irrespective of education. One way that implicit bias manifests itself in naturally occurring interaction may be through the process of speaker selection during questioning.

- by Asifa Majid
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- Discourse Comprehension, Implicit Bias
- by Jung-Mo Lee
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- Inference, Discourse Comprehension, Discourse Processing, Text Processing

The aim of this article is to provide an overview of how the establishment of discourse connections among spoken statements has been studied by approaches to discourse analysis and psycholinguistic studies, in order to highlight what variables appear to be important for understanding how comprehension of spoken discourse can be facilitated. Consideration of discourse analysis approaches allows us to think about the role of the establishment of discourse connections among speech acts in the classroom, the uses of contextualization cues by bilingual students, the identification of social and cultural notions in teachers’ discourse, and the interactional effects of teachers’ interventions. Preliminary psycholinguistic studies contribute to our understanding of the role of establishing causal connections and integrating adjacent statements through the presence of discourse markers in the comprehension of spoken discourse by college students. The results of these approaches and studies provide insight into students’ comprehension of classroom discourse, and hold the potential for implications for instruction.

- by Jazmín Cevasco and +1
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- Discourse Analysis, Psycholinguistics, Connectives, Reading
- by Jung-Mo Lee
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- Contrast Agents, Memory, Discourse Comprehension, Coherence
- by Tanya Stivers
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- Sociology, Psychology, Cognitive Science, Discourse Comprehension

Much work in psycholinguistics and social psychology has investigated the notion of implicit causality associated with verbs. Crinean and Garnham (2006) relate implicit causality to another phenomenon, implicit consequentiality. We argue that they and other researchers have confused the meanings of events and the reasons for those events, so that particular thematic roles (e.g., Agent, Patient) are taken to be causes or consequences of those events by definition. In accord with Garvey and Caramazza (1974), we propose that implicit causality and consequentiality are probabilistic notions that are straightforwardly related to the explicit causes and consequences of events and are analogous to other biases investigated in psycholinguistics.

- by Asifa Majid
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- Discourse Comprehension

The comprehension of discourse involves the establishment of causal connections among statements. The Causal Network Theory (Trabasso & Sperry, 1985) allows us to examine the role of these connections in the construction of a coherent text representation. Cevasco and van den Broek (2008) applied its tools to explore the comprehension of spontaneous spoken discourse. Their results indicate that statements that have a large number of causal connections facilitate comprehension to a greater extent than those that have a low number of connections. These findings suggest that listeners rely on processing the causal interconnections between a speaker's statements to derive a coherent representation of discourse in memory, and can provide useful insights for educators.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of filled pauses (uh) on the verification of words and the establishment of causal connections during the comprehension of spoken expository discourse. With this aim, we asked Spanish-speaking students to listen to excerpts of interviews with writers, and to perform a word-verification task and a question-answering task on causal connectivity. There were two versions of the excerpts: filled pause present and filled pause absent. Results indicated that filled pauses increased verification times for words that preceded them, but did not make a difference on response times to questions on causal connectivity. The results suggest that, as signals of delay, filled pauses create a break with surface information, but they do not have the same effect on the establishment of meaningful connections.

- by Jazmín Cevasco and +1
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- Causal Inference, Discourse Comprehension, Filled Pause
- by Jung-Mo Lee
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- Contrast Agents, Discourse Comprehension, Text Processing

Palabras clave: claves prosódicas, comprensión del discurso, generación de inferencias, discurso oral espontáneo, modelo CoSESM materials and examining the role of prosodic cues and pitch accents in the establishment of connections among... more

- by Jazmín Cevasco
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Vocabulary

A brief survey of linguistic studies on the nature of contrast information in discourse was presented first, and an attempt was also made to incorporate the linguistic theories and concepts about contrast in discourse into a psychological framework. A tentative model of processing of contrastive information in discourse was proposed, and eight experimental studies on the effect of contrastive information on comprehension and memory of short and long discourses were reviewed. Experimental results showed that contrastive sentences took more time to process at encoding, and yet were recognized faster and cued-recalled in greater amount than noncontrastive sentences. It was also found that levels of contrast in the discourse structure have some effects on encoding time. It was further found that the sentence immediately following the contrastive sentence was processed slowly regardless of whether it does or does not resolve the contrast. The implications of the results of empirical studies were discussed in relation to developing a research framework that integrate coherence studies and contrast studies across the two disciplines of linguistics and cognitive psychology.

- by Jae-Ho Lee
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- Discourse Comprehension

While significant attention has been devoted to prosody in discourse production, relatively little is known about prosody's effect on discourse interpretation. This paper explores the ability of synthetic manipulations of prosody to bias interpretation of discourse ambiguities where a first sentence is linked to two following sentences either by coordinating (Narration) or subordinating (Elaboration) discourse relations. In Experiment 1, manipulations of pitch, pause duration and intensity were found to influence discourse interpretation. In Experiment 2, subsets of these prosodic contrasts were compared. A bias for more coordination interpretations was found only for subsets with rising pitch at the end of the first sentence, including one where that was the only contrast, showing that rising pitch alone can disambiguate discourse. Participants also expressed more confidence when choosing a coordination interpretation after hearing a rise or a subordination interpretation after hearing a fall. Results demonstrate that the discourse disambiguation ability of prosody goes beyond ambiguities of scope and reference to hierarchical ambiguities of coordinating and subordinating discourse relations.Accepted Author Version. Not yet edited or proofed. Please see disclaimer on the article abstract page.

- by Joseph Tyler
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- Discourse, Prosody, Discourse Comprehension

The generation of causal inferences is central for the comprehension of discourse. Its role has tended to be studied in relation to written discourse. Its role in the comprehension of spoken discourse has not received the same attention. Considering this gap, the purpose of this paper was to present a selection of topics that have been approached in the investigation of the generation of causal inferences in the comprehension of written discourse, and to describe preliminary studies that have began to approach its role in the comprehension of spoken discourse. With this aim, I will present studies that have focused on the generation of necessary and optional inferences, and will emphasize the generation of inferences that involve the establishment of causal connections among statements in the comprehension of written discourse. In addition, I will present studies that have begun to explore the role of the generation of these inferences in the comprehension of spoken discourse. The consideration of these studies will allow us to highlight some of the variables that have been suggested to be central for the study of this topic, and discuss future directions for studies that examine the role that the characteristics of the modality of presentation of discourse have in comprehension.

El objetivo de este estudio fue examinar el rol de la conectividad causal de los enunciados (baja-alta) y la modalidad de presentación del discurso (oral-escrita) en la generación de inferencias emocionales. Con este fin, se pidió a un grupo de estudiantes universitarios que escucharan o leyeran un fragmento de una entrevista de radio, y que luego realizaran una tarea de recuerdo libre y una encuesta de emociones. Los resultados indicaron que la condición de escucha facilitó el recuerdo de emociones en comparación con la lectura. A su vez, los enunciados que tenían un número alto de conexiones causales fueron más recordados que aquellos que tenían un bajo número de ellas. Por su parte, los enunciados que tenían una conectividad causal alta fueron más identificados como generadores de emociones en la encuesta que aquellos que tenían una conectividad causal baja. Estos resultados sugieren que la modalidad de presentación del discurso y la conectividad causal de sus enunciados tienen un rol en la probabilidad de que un lector o hablante genere una inferencia emocional.

- by Jazmín Cevasco
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- Emotion, Inference, Comprensión de lectura, Discourse Comprehension
- by Brock Dubbels
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- Literacy, Game studies, Media Studies, Design

Esta investigación tiene como objetivo determinar el nivel de comprensión que logran los estudiantes universitarios de una carrera de Pedagogía en Castellano de una universidad del Consejo de Rectores de la Zona Central cuando se enfrentan a la lectura de textos del área de la lingüística con predominancia de distintos sistemas semióticos. Para lograr este objetivo se diseñaron dos pruebas de comprensión, una con predominancia del sistema semiótico verbal y otra con predominancia del sistema gráfico que, luego de ser validadas y pilotadas, se aplicaron a 60 alumnos universitarios del ya mencionado programa. Tomando como base el modelo de van Dijk & Kintsch y el modelo de comprensión multimodal de Schnotz, ambas pruebas apuntan a medir la comprensión en diferentes niveles (van Dijk & Kintsch 1983; Schnotz 2005). Los resultados arrojan que la predominancia de distintos sistemas semióticos en la lectura de textos del área de lingüística no incide significativamente en sus niveles de logro. Palabras clave: comprensión discursiva, multimodalidad, texto multimodal, modelos de comprensión. ABSTRACT This research aims to determine the level of comprehension that university students achieve in a Pedagogy in Spanish degree program when they are faced with reading texts from the area of linguistics which demonstrate the predominance of different semiotic systems. To achieve this goal, two comprehension tests were designed, one with a predominance of the verbal semiotic system and another with a predominance of the graphic system, which, after being validated and piloted, were applied to 60 university students of the aforementioned program. Based on van Dijk & Kintsch's model and Schnotz's multimodal comprehension model, both tests aim to measure comprehension at different levels (van Dijk & Kintsch 1983; Schnotz 2005). The results show that the predominance of different semiotic systems in the reading of texts in the area of linguistics does not significantly influence the levels of achievement.

- by Violeta Cautin-Epifani
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- Discourse Comprehension