Singer, M., & O'Connell, G. (2003). Robust inference processes in expository text comprehension. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 15(4), 607-631.
Singer, M.; O'Connell, G.
2003
Singer, M., & O'Connell, G. (2003). Robust inference processes in expository text comprehension. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 15(4), 607-631.
1a-1b
Expository text offers particular challenges to the reader because of the abstract and unfamiliar concepts that it presents and its distinctive structure. The present study had three interrelated aims: (1) It examined the impact of appropriate connectives on the reader's derivation of causal bridging inferences from expository text. (2) It scrutinised texts longer than the ones that we had previously examined (Singer, Harkness, & Stewart, 1997), which in turn made it possible to (3) evaluate the impact of position in the text on inference processing. In Experiments 1a and 1b with 68 and 64 college students respectively, a joint profile of target reading times and inference answer times indicated that the inspected inferences reliably accompanied reading only in the presence of appropriate causal connectives. The connective-present conditions of Experiment 1 replicated our previous findings using shorter texts (Singer et al., 1997). Experiment 2 indicated that these inference processes are unaffected by text position. We interpreted these findings with reference to the inference validation model (Singer, Halldorson, Lear, & Andrusiak, 1992).
The joint pattern of reading times for the target sentences and answer times for the inference questions clearly supported the prediction that the present bridging inferences would occur only in the presence of appropriate connectives. In the presence of connectives, target reading time was greater in the implicit condition than in the explicit condition and answer time was about equal in those conditions, a pattern that diagnoses the on-line computation of these inferences. Without connectives in contrast, reading time was about equal in the two conditions, and implicit answer time exceeded explicit answer time.
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