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.

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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).

Experiment 2 revealed approximately equal reading times and answer times among the alternative positions of the target sentence. This pattern indicated that the states of the crucial inferences is similar in the three conditions. Because all of our prior experiments indicated that these inferences are computed in the implicit condition when a connective is present, we conclude that the crucial inferences were derived in all three scrutinised text positions.

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