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

In the present study, we explored the influence of emotional words on the semantic integration of their following neutral nouns during sentence comprehension. We manipulated the emotionality of verbs and the semantic congruity of their following (neutral) object nouns in sentences. Eventrelated potentials were recorded to the verbs, which were either negative or neutral, and to the object nouns, which were either semantically congruent or incongruent relative to the preceding contexts. We found an N400 and a P600 effect in response to the semantic congruity of the nouns when they followed the neutral verbs. However, the P600 (but not the N400) semantic congruity effect may have been attenuated when the nouns followed the negative verbs. Meanwhile, the negative verbs elicited a larger P2 and N400 than did the neutral verbs. The results indicate that the attention captured by emotional words impaired reanalysis of the following incongruent information, demonstrating a dynamic influence of emotional words on the semantic processing of following information during sentence comprehension.

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- Psychology, Behavioral Sciences, Cognition, Attention

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.

- by P.W. Van Den Broek
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- Psychology, Education, Linguistics, Educación

Previous research provides evidence for expectation-driven processing within sentences at phonological, lexical, and syntactic levels of linguistic structure. Less well-established is whether comprehenders also anticipate pragmatic relationships between sentences. To address this, we evaluate a unit of discourse structure that comprehenders must infer to hold between sentences in order for a discourse to make sense-the intersentential coherence relation. In a novel eyetracking paradigm, we trained participants to associate particular spatial locations with particular coherence relations. Experiment 1 shows that the subset of listeners who successfully acquired the location~relation mappings during training subsequently looked to these locations during testing in response to a coherence-signaling intersentential connective. Experiment 2 finds that listeners' looks during sentences containing coherence-biasing verbs reveal expectations about upcoming sentence types. This work extends existing research on prediction beyond sentence-internal structure and provides a new methodology for examining the cues that comprehenders use to establish relationships at the discourse level.

- by William S Horton
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- Psychology, Eye tracking, Cognition, Linguistics

Decodificación, comprensión lectora y habilidades lingüísticas en escolares con Trastorno Específico del Lenguaje de primero básico Palabras clave: trastorno especifico de lenguaje; decodificación; comprensión lectora; conciencia fonológica; léxico; narración. Resumen Specific language impairment (SLI) is one of the most common childhood disorders in oral communication and is characterized by the presence of difficulties in the different language components. Children with SLI are a risk group for learning written language. Their heterogeneity of linguistic and metalinguistic characteristics can impact their reader profile. It is known that

- by zulema De Barbieri
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- Psychology, Humanities, Narrative, Phonological Awareness
- by P.W. Van Den Broek
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- Psychology, Education, Inference, Causal Inference

- by Paul Van Den Broek
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- Psychology, Education, Linguistics, Educación
- by Paul Van Den Broek
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- Psychology, Education, Inference, Causal Inference

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 Paul Van Den Broek
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Philosophy

It is well established that gestures and speech form an integrated system of communication; gestures that match the meaning of the speech they accompany favor the listener's discourse comprehension, whereas mismatching gestures whose meaning conveys information contradicting that conveyed by speech, impair comprehension. A less investigated issue is whether or not the uptake of gestural information is a deterministic process. In line with recent studies in the literature, we purport that the process may be modulated by certain factors. In particular, we investigate the role of unrelated gestures whose meaning, which is irrelevant to the speech they accompany, could be neglected. The results of four experiments led us to conclude that unrelated gestures are not processed, and that the uptake of gestural information is a non-deterministic process.

- by Ilaria Cutica
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Communication, Gesture

Recent studies in the psychological literature reveal that co-speech gestures facilitate the construction of an articulated mental model of an oral discourse by hearing individuals. In particular, they facilitate correct recollections and discourse-based inferences at the expense of memory for discourse verbatim. Do gestures accompanying an oral discourse facilitate the construction of a discourse model also by oral deaf individuals trained to lip-read? The atypical cognitive functioning of oral deaf individuals leads to this prediction. Our Experiments 1 and 2, each conducted on 16 oral deaf individuals, used a recollection task and confirmed the prediction. Our Experiment 3, conducted on 36 oral deaf individuals, confirmed the prediction using a recognition task.

- by Ilaria Cutica
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Learning, Gestures

- by Ilaria Cutica
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Communication, Gesture
- by Carla Maturano
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- Humanities, Física, Ilustración, Enseñanza de las ciencias
- by Amedeo D'Angiulli
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- Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, Computer Science

A significant number of ninth-grade students still struggles with proficiently comprehending texts. Moreover, their increasingly lowering motivation to read is alarming. Various educational interventions designed to enhance reading comprehension and/or motivation are available in the scientific field. However, a detailed description of its underlying principles is frequently lacking. This detailed description could provide genuine opportunities for replication, theory building, and dissemination into practice. Therefore, the main goal of the present study is to offer an analytic, rigorous, and detailed description of an instructional program aimed at fostering ninth-grade vocational students' reading comprehension, strategy use, and autonomous reading motivation, named ProjectExpert. The context, theoretical and/or empirical grounding, macro and micro-level design principles will be outlined, based on the framework of Bouwer and De Smedt (2018). ProjectExpert entails four design principles: (1) Text reading is goal-directed. (2) The instruction is embedded in a motivating learning environment rooted in the fulfilment of students' basic psychological needs. (3) By means of explicit strategy instruction students are taught to use a repertoire of cognitive and metacognitive reading comprehension strategies. (4) Students practice reading and applying reading strategies in heterogeneous pairs. Moreover, during the design, a stepwise procedure was adopted to guarantee the feasibility and usability of the design principles for this particular group of teachers and students. This stepwise procedure and the implications for the design of ProjectExpert are described in detail. Finally, the relational structure of the design principles and challenges related to implementing them into practice are discussed.

- by Hilde Van Keer
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- Psychology, Computer Science, Instructional Design, Mathematics Education

, is that only those inferences necessary for a coherent interpretation of a text are routinely made, and that they are typically made in a backward direction. A related idea is found in the minimalist hypothesis of McKoon and Ratcliff (1992), which claims that only those inferences needed for local cohesion and those that are based on information readily available in memory are automatically made. The minimalist claim that knowledge-based inferences might be made suggests that inferences are probably not restricted solely to those needed for coherence. However, the specific claim in the minimalist hypothesis is problematic (e.g., Graesser, Singer, & Trabasso, 1994), largely because of the difficulty of establishing a criterion for what information is readily available that is independentof which inferences are made. Garnham (1989) made a different suggestion about a set of inferences that are both unnecessary for coherence and possibly made routinely. His suggestion was that inferences that depend on the presence of a single lexical item in a text might be made. Garnham first made this suggestion in connection with the results of Garrod and Sanford (1981). Garrod and Sanford studied a set of inferences that looked very like the bridging inferences studied by Haviland and Clark (1974) and others, and which were shown to be made in a backward direction. So, (3) was read more slowly after (2) than after (1): (1) We got some beer out of the trunk. (2) We checked the picnic supplies. (3) The beer was warm. This result suggested that the inference that there was beer among the (Californian) picnic supplies was not made elaboratively when the picnic supplies were first mentioned, but only in order to understand the definite reference to beer in (3). Garrod and Sanford studied the apparently similar contrast of (4) or (5) followed by (6), but found that no extra time was required to interpret (6) following (5) in examples of this kind: (4) Mary put the clothes on the baby. (5) Mary dressed the baby. (6) The clothes were made of pink wool. Garnham's (1989) suggestion was based on the fact that the definition of dress makes reference to clothes. The representation of (4), therefore, already contains a representation of a set of clothes to which the definite noun phrase "The clothes" in (6) can refer. By contrast, there is no single lexical item in (2) with a definition that includes beer. It is widely accepted that lexical entries have complex definitions. So, it is plausible that simply by using the meaning of dress, among other things, to construct the meaning of (5), clothes are automatically encoded into the representation. In (2), on the other hand, an additional inference would be required to encode a representation of beer into the representation of that sentence, and this work may well not be carried out.

- by David Reynolds
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Semantics, Social Cognition
- by Fim Craik
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- Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, Psycholinguistics

This study examined whether systematic whole-body stimulation and increased attention to visuospatial motion patterns can enhance the appraisal of action meanings evoked by naturalistic texts. Participants listened to action and neutral (non-action) narratives before and after videogame-based bodily training, and responded to questions on information realized by verbs (denoting abstract and action processes) and circumstances (conveying locative or temporal details, for example). Strategically, we worked with dyslexic children, whose potential comprehension deficits could give room to post-training improvements. Results showed a selective boost in understanding of action information, even when controlling for baseline performance. Also, this effect proved uninfluenced by short-term memory skills, and it was absent when training relied on non-action videogames requiring minimal bodily engagement. Of note, the movements described in the texts did not match those performed by participa...

- by Agustin Ibanez
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- Neuroscience, Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Narrative

- by Monica Bucciarelli
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Learning, Gestures

Previous research has demonstrated that the activation of predictive inferences can be affected both by the immediately preceding context and by the information contained in an earlier portion of a passage. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the same immediate context can result in the activation of different inferences when different character trait descriptions of the protagonist were presented earlier in the passage. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the trait descriptions produced activation of a specific inference; this occurred even though the immediately preceding context, in isolation, led to the activation of a different inference. The results of both experiments offer further support for the view that inference activation occurs as a result of the combined influence of the immediate context and the earlier portions of a text.

- by Sabine Gueraud
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Semantics, Visual perception

Language comprehension deficits are characteristic for various forms of specific developmental disorders of speech and language. These deficits are especially characteristic for aphasia with epilepsy and specific language disorders. Main goal of this study was examination of language comprehension in children with specific developmental language disorder and changes in electroencephalographic activities (EEG) compared with children who have specific language disorders and normal EEG findings. The examination included three levels: lexical, syntactic (grammatical) and discourse. The entire sample included 14 children, aged between 5 and 7, who were on speech and language treatment at the Institute for Psycho-Physiological and Speech Disorders 'Professor Cvetko Brajović'. The children were divided into two groups: experimental and control. Experimental group included seven children with specific language disorders who had changes in EEG activity, and control group included sev...

- by Mile Vuković
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- Discourse Comprehension, Word Comprehension

Evaluación dE una intErvEnción pEdagógica dE alfabEtización visual En la comprEnsión lEctora dE tExtos multimodalEs En programas dE formación inicial docEntE En lEnguajE y comunicación* Miguel Farías Farías** Resumen Al abordar la lectura de textos multimodales desde una perspectiva socio semiótica, buscamos estrategias de andamiaje en alfabetización visual que orienten su comprensión. Definido un protocolo de intervención, se diseñaron textos con preguntas textuales y multimodales. Se usó un modelo semi experimental, con estudiantes en formación inicial docente en Lenguaje y Comunicación de dos universidades de la Región Metropolitana. Un grupo fue expuesto a la intervención y a pruebas de comprensión lectora; otro, solo a pruebas de comprensión. Los resultados no mostraron diferencias significativas entre los grupos. Se evalúa i) la necesidad de mayor exposición al andamiaje, ii) las estrategias de transferencia y iii) la complejidad de los textos. Conceptualmente se adaptó un modelo con intervenciones en tres estadios semióticos. Palabras clave: protocolo de alfabetización visual, comprensión lectora, texto multimodal. assEssing a pEdagogical intErvEntion in visual litEracy for rEading comprEhEnsion of multimodal tExts in languagE and communication prE-sErvicE tEachEr Education

Resumen El principio y el efecto de redundancia parecieran ser un impedimento para el aprendizaje en campos diversos. Este trabajo da cuenta de una investigación que intenta probar si tal redundancia tiene también efectos negativos en el aprendizaje de expresiones idiomáticas en inglés como lengua extranjera. Dos grupos de estudiantes universitarios fueron expuestos a dos tipos de presentaciones multimodales: uno, a texto en pantalla, narración e imagen fija; y el otro a texto en pantalla y narración. Según el principio de redundancia, la presentación del primer grupo duplicaría la información y conllevaría a una sobrecarga cognitiva. Aunque los resultados indican que no hay mayor variación entre los dos grupos en cuanto a retención, en transferencia hay variaciones atribuibles a las características semánticas del vocabulario presentado. Palabras clave: aprendizaje multimodal, principio y efecto de redundancia, expresiones idiomáticas, inglés como lengua extranjera Abstract The prin...

- by Miguel Farias
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- Philosophy, Art

In this article, we discuss the notion of a 'conversation analytic intervention,' focusing on the role of conversation analysis in the major stages of intervention research, epitomized by the randomized controlled trial, the gold standard for intervention in the medical sciences. These stages embrace development, feasibility and piloting, evaluation, and implementation. We describe how conversation analytic methods are used as part of the first two stages and how a conversation analytic skill base and sensibility must be deployed in managing the last two stages. Through a review of practical requirements for successful, externally-funded intervention research, we provide suggestions for how to maximize the potential for basic, conversation analytic research to eventuate in intervention. Data are in American English. The progressive expansion in the range, quality, and reliability of conversation analytic (CA) findings over recent years has increased confidence that these findings will find significance in real-world applications. These applications are, of course, various. As Antaki (2011) observed, there are numerous ways in which CA findings can be applied, such as toward the establishment of new areas of scholarship or toward a better understanding of macrosocial issues, communication problems, organic/psychological disorders, and the workings of social institutions. When CA is

- by John Heritage
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- Psychology, Conversation Analysis, Linguistics, Conversation

El rol del numero de conexiones causales de cada enunciado en el recuerdo de discurso escrito y oral ha sido destacado por estudios acerca de la comprension de discurso. La importancia del rol conversacional del hablante que produce cada enunciado, y de la posesion de una version coherente del evento sobre el que se conversa han sido destacados por estudios acerca de la formacion de la memoria de una conversacion por parte de sus participantes. El proposito de este estudio fue explorar el interjuego entre la conectividad causal de los enunciados escuchados, su congruencia o incongruencia con la version original del evento del participante (una historia) y el rol conversacional del hablante que produce cada uno de los enunciados (narrador -no narrador) en el recuerdo posterior de una conversacion. Los resultados sugieren que tanto la conectividad causal de los enunciados, asi como el rol conversacional del hablante, y la congruencia de los enunciados con la version del evento del par...

- by Felipe Muller
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- Humanities, Art

Computational storytelling systems have mainly focused on the construction and evaluation of textual discourse for communicating stories. Few intelligent camera systems have been built in 3D environments for effective visual communication of stories. The evaluation of effectiveness of these systems, if any, has focused mainly on the run-time performance of the camera placement algorithms. The purpose of this paper is to present a systematic cognitive-based evaluation methodology to compare effects of different cinematic visualization strategies on viewer comprehension of stories. In particular, an evaluation of automatically generated visualizations from Darshak, a cinematic planning system, against different hand-generated visualization strategies is presented. The methodology used in the empirical evaluation is based on QUEST, a cognitive framework for question-answering in the context of stories, that provides validated predictors for measuring story coherence in readers. Data collected from viewers, who watch the same story renedered with three different visualization strategies, is compared with QUEST's predictor metrics. Initial data analysis establishes significant effect on choice of visualization strategy on story comprehension. It further shows a significant effect of visualization strategy selected by Darshak on viewers' measured story coherence.

- by Arnav Jhala
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- Computer Science, Visualization, Data Analysis, Interactive Digital Storytelling

- by Isabelle Tapiero
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Semantics, Visual perception

Este artículo presenta los resultados de un estudio en el que se investiga la relación entre el vocabulario y la memoria, por una parte, y la comprensión de textos descriptivos orales, por otra, en preescolares. Se postula como hipótesis que el desarrollo léxico y la memoria presentan no solo una correlación significativa con el rendimiento en comprensión, sino que estas variables puedan además predecir el desempeño en el nivel discursivo. Se efectuó un estudio con 36 niños de un rango etario entre 4; 5 y 5; 7 años, a los cuales se les aplicó un test de vocabulario pasivo (TEVI-R), una prueba de discriminación léxica (TDL), un test de memoria (Evalúa-0) y una prueba de comprensión oral de textos descriptivos desarrollada ad hoc para esta investigación. Los resultados permiten confirmar que tanto la memoria como el léxico se correlacionan significativamente con la comprensión. En un análisis de regresión, no obstante, solo el léxico (en las dos medidas utilizadas) resultó un predictor estadísticamente significativo del desarrollo en comprensión de textos descriptivos. En su conjunto, las evidencias encontradas respaldan las propuestas que destacan el papel del vocabulario en el desarrollo temprano de habilidades discursivas.

- by Fernando Reyes
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- Psychology, Humanities, Vocabulary, Language Development

Investigaciones acerca de la formación de la memoria grupal han destacado la importancia de los enunciados del narrador de un grupo y la confiabilidad de los hablantes. Investigaciones acerca de la comprensión del discurso han señalado la importancia del rol de las conexiones causales. El propósito de esta investigación fue explorar el rol de las conexiones causales de los enunciados, del rol conversacional y de la confiabilidad del hablante en el recuerdo de conversaciones grupales. Los resultados indicaron que tanto la conectividad causal, así como la confiabilidad del hablante tienen un efecto en la probabilidad de recuerdo de enunciados conversacionales, sugiriendo que una serie de factores psicológicos y sociales intervienen en la conformación de la memoria grupal.

- by Jaz Cev
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- Humanities, Análisis del Discurso

The study of the role of prosodic breaks and pitch accents in comprehension has usually focused on sentence processing, through the use of laboratory speech produced by both trained and untrained speakers. In comparison, little attention has been paid to their role in the comprehension and production of spontaneous discourse, or to the interplay between prosodic cues and pitch accents and the generation of inferences. This article describes studies which have focused on the effects of prosodic boundaries and pitch accents in sentence comprehension. Their results suggest that prosody has an early influence in the parsing of sentences as well as the processing of the information structure of a statement. It also presents a new model of spontaneous discourse comprehension that can accommodate paralinguistic factors, like pitch and prosody, and other communication channels and their relation to cognitive processes. Stemming from the model presented, future research directions are sugges...

- by Jaz Cev
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Speech Prosody, Linguistics
- by Jaz Cev
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- Psychology, Teaching and Learning, Education, Inference

The aim of this study was to examine the effect of the presence of the discourse marker 'then' ('después' in Spanish), the causal connectivity of the statements, and the prior knowledge of the comprehender on the identification of topic shifts. With this aim, we asked Spanish-speaking college students to read the transcripts of four conversations in Spanish, and to perform a topic identification task with confidence ratings. There were two versions of the materials: discourse markers-present and discourse markers-absent. Half of the participants received prior information on the topic of the conversations and half did not. The presence of 'then' did not increase response accuracy to the topic identification task, but it did lead to higher confidence ratings than discourse marker absence. Statements that had a high number of causal connections were identified more often as introducing a topic shift than those that had a low number of them. And, students with no prior knowledge available provided higher confidence ratings than those with prior knowledge available. These results suggest that discourse marker presence, causal connectivity and prior knowledge availability have a role in the construction of a coherent representation of the joint projects that speakers accomplish during a conversation.

- by Jaz Cev
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Discourse Markers, Reading Comprehension

- by Jaz Cev
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Philosophy

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. The 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 Jaz Cev
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- Discourse Analysis, Psychology, Psycholinguistics, Connectives

El objetivo de este trabajo es señalar las aportaciones que los estudios acerca de la comprensión del discurso escrito expositivo, el discurso oral no expositivo y el discurso oral expositivo pueden hacer a la promoción del aprendizaje en el ámbito educativo. A su vez, destacar la importancia de realizar nuevos estudios que consideren las variables que facilitan la comprensión del discurso escrito expositivo, y no se han investigado en relación con el discurso oral expositivo. Con este fin, se presentan estudios acerca del diseño de textos de refutación y procedimientos de revisión de textos en la comprensión del discurso escrito expositivo. A su vez, se presentan estudios acerca del procesamiento de errores del habla, claves prosódicas, conexiones causales, y marcadores del discurso en la comprensión del discurso oral no expositivo. Finalmente, se presentan estudios acerca del rol de los marcadores del discurso, velocidad de dicción y entrenamiento en habilidades cognitivas en la comprensión del discurso oral expositivo. Se señala que la consideración de toda esta serie de estudios puede contribuir a decidir qué cambios introducir en los materiales didácticos escritos para facilitar la comprensión lectora, y qué variables acerca de la comprensión del discurso oral expositivo y no expositivo se puede tener en cuenta a la hora de exponer una clase. Palabras clave: Discurso Expositivo; Comprensión; Discurso Oral. The aim of this paper was to highlight the contribution of studies on the comprehension of expository written discourse, and expository and non-expository oral discourse to the facilitation of student learning. It also draws attention to the importance of conducting new studies to explore the role of the variables that facilitate expository written discourse and which have not been investigated in relation to expository oral discourse. Studies that have focused on the design of refutational texts and text revision procedures in the comprehension of expository written discourse are presented, as well as studies on the processing of disfluencies, prosodic cues, causal connections and discourse markers in the comprehension of non-expository oral discourse. Finally, studies on the role of discourse markers, speech rate and metacognitive strategy instruction are presented. It is suggested that these studies can contribute to deciding what revisions to make to written materials in order to improve reading comprehension, and what variables that facilitate the comprehension of expository and non-expository oral discourse to take into account when presenting a lecture.

- by Jaz Cev
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- Philosophy, Humanities, Comprehension, Expository Discourse

This study investigated the generation of emotional inferences during the reading and recall of narrative texts. Experiment 1 compared the fit of two simulations of text comprehension to the recall data. One simulation examined causal and referential inferences, while the other examined causal, referential and emotional inferences. We found that the simulation that involved emotional inferences provided a better fit to the human data than the other simulation. Experiment 2 tested whether emotional inferences are generated online by recording lexical decision times at pre-inference and inference locations. Lexical decision times were faster at the inference than the pre-inference locations. These findings suggest that emotional inferences play a role in the understanding of natural texts, and that they require the reader to establish connections between text segments.

- by Jaz Cev
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- Psychology, Humanities, Universidad de Buenos Aires

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 Jaz Cev
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- Psychology, Philosophy, Humanities, Causal Inference

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

- by Saleh Ramadan
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- Psychology, Linguistics, Inference, Comprehension
- by Don Norman
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- Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, Computer Science

The co-influence of grammatical markers (connectives) and comprehender goals (directed forgetting cues) on the memory for sentences was examined in three experiments. Participants read statement pairs which were linked by a connective (e.g., because) or stood alone as separate sentences. After each statement, a cue to remember or to forget the preceding statement was presented. In Experiment 1, participants had more difficulty forgetting the second clause in the presence of the connective because than in its absence when statement 1 was to be remembered. In Experiment 2, the pattern of directed forgetting was similar for the connectives because and and, suggesting that one reason why directed forgetting was reduced for the second statement in Experiment 1 was that it merely continued a linguistic structure rather than increasing causal-based inferences. In Experiment 3, the connective was placed after the cue for statement 1, making it more difficult for readers to incorporate the second clause to the first. Under these conditions, the connective did not reduce intentional forgetting. The pattern of results indicates that the goal to forget a phrase has a smaller impact on forgetting when an incoming representation can be readily attached to a TBR representation in working memory as directed by a grammatical marker.

- by Keith Millis
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Linguistics, Forgetting

Resumen Los objetivos de esta investigación son conocer el desempeño lector y narrativo de escolares con TeL y estudiar sus posibles relaciones en estos sujetos. Se trabajó con 31 estudiantes (12 alumnos con TeL y déficit gramatical y 19 estudiantes sin problemas de lenguaje). Todos cursaban 1° básico en escuelas con proyectos de integración. Se les evaluó la comprensión y producción de narraciones orales, la decodificación y la comprensión lectora. Los resultados mostraron que los escolares con TeL presentan como grupo problemas en la lectura (comprensión y decodificación) pese a que sus desempeños lectores son variables. Además, evidencian un rendimiento narrativo similar al de los alumnos sin problemas de lenguaje. Finalmente, no se encontró relación entre el desempeño lector y las habilidades narrativas orales en ambos grupos.

- by NELLY IVONNE JIMENEZ CHAVEZ
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Análisis de un instrumento estandarizado para la evaluación de la comprensión lectora a partir de un modelo psicolingüístico * Analysis of a Standardized Instrument for Reading Comprehension Assessment from a Psycholinguistic Model Análise de um instrumento padronizado para a avaliação da compreensão leitora a partir de um modelo psicolinguístico

- by Angie Martinez
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- Psychology, Reading Comprehension, Comprensión Lectora

La presente investigación se enmarca en el campo del análisis del discurso, en cuya área
los especialistas han centrado su interés en la identificación, descripción y
clasificación de las variables estructurales y funcionales que son intrínsecas al discurso. Esta labor se ha desarrollado con el fin de revelar y describir tanto el funcionamiento del sistema de la lengua como su realización a través del discurso
en la gran variedad de comunidades discursivas existentes.

- by Cristian Aravena
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- Multimodal Discourse Analysis, Multimodality

- by David Reynolds
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Semantics, Social Cognition

- by Fernando Reyes
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- Psychology, Humanities, Vocabulary, Language Development

This study addressed age-related changes in the ability to draw inferences, and examined the generation process of the inferences themselves. Second-, fifth-, and eighth-grade children, and college undergraduates read eight stories from which two types of inferences could be drawn: those that are critical to the comprehension of a story (backward inferences), and those that are not (forward inferences). Subjects then answered questions testing whether the appropriate inferences had been drawn. Backward inferences were drawn more reliably and more rapidly than were forward inferences, at all grade levels. The results suggest that children as young as second grade are able to draw inferences from text, particularly when the coherence of the text requires such inferences, but that the ability to draw both kinds of inferences still increases with age. It is also suggested that, for all ages, backward inferences are most likely to be drawn at the time the text is encoded, while forward inferences are most likely to be drawn only when needed, at retrieval. RESUME Cohe'rence textuelle et de'veloppement des capacitb de production d'in fkrences Beaucoup soutiennent que la capacite a faire des inferences est un important dkterminant de la comprkhension en lecture. Quoiqu'il y ait abondance de recherches montrant que l'enfant et l'adulte sont des producteurs d'infkrence prolixes, quand on s'intkresse au lieu de production des infkrences, l'image est beaucoup moins Claire. La question n'est plus de savoir si les enfants et les adultes peuvent faire des infkrences, mais de savoir quand on fait ces inferences. Les inferences sont-elles encodees lors de la comprkhension et, par conskquent, sont-elles stockkes en tant que

- by Mark Casteel
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- Psychology, Reading, Curriculum and Pedagogy