ABSTRACT. The goal of this talk is less to present new empirical evidence than to locate and define an underinvestigated area for research in reading. The empirical study of reading has long distinguished between online processes (those that occur as a reader is actively inputting textual information) and offline product (the situation model that serves as a reader’s mental representation of a text). Different experimental methodologies have developed to examine both facets of reading, with online processes being measured in reading times, eye tracking, responses to probes, and think-aloud protocols, while offline products are measured in memory protocols, comprehension questions, and transfer tasks. Although researchers would probably agree that the offline situation model resulting after a reader has finished reading is not static, research has tended to treat it as a memory subject largely to variations in degree of accessibility. Yet within the history of reading, especially of literary reading, a widespread assumption has been that books provide their greatest catalyst to new thought after readers have finished them, because after they have finished, readers can create a global meaning and attempt to integrate it into their existing knowledge structures. This talk will argue for the value of taking seriously the online processes of readers after reading to capture a critical moment in comprehension.

ABSTRACT. Aesthetic responses occur when we encounter and comprehend language (e.g., literary texts) and the visual arts (e.g., artwork, film). In our talk, we ask the question of whether and how comprehension is linked to aesthetic responses. Using published and archival data, we suggest that models of discourse comprehension models predict aesthetic responses to paintings. We will also discuss the nature of this relationship and the utility of studying aesthetic responses to discourse.

ABSTRACT. How does the text of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice cue readers to construct, retrieve, and run mental models of fictional characters over the course of the narrative? This study offers an account of how literary scholars can draw on models from text comprehension and social reasoning to specify the narrative strategies that particular novelists tend to employ. It proposes that Jane Austen is particularly effective at getting readers to learn the dispositions of her literary characters.

ABSTRACT. As people experience narratives, they often have the experience of being deeply drawn into the worlds of those narratives. The participatory perspective on narrative experiences suggests that people encode cognitive and emotional responses as if they were side-participants in the narrative’s events. For example, narrators often generate suspense by providing information to readers that is unknown to characters. Thus, readers may find themselves offering urgent mental advice to characters who are unaware of the bomb that is quickly ticking down to “zero.” The mental contents people encode (e.g., “Run!”) are participatory responses. The participatory responses help explain the depth of narrative experiences: They make people’s experiences more personally engaging.

This talk will review research evidence that supports the perspective that readers and viewers function as side-participants in their narrative experience. The talk will begin with a discussion of suspense, and how participation functions to increase the intensity of suspense. It will then turn to a consideration of how readers’ knowledge and desires structure their narrative experiences. The talk will review evidence that narrators often prompt readers and viewers to prefer actions and outcomes that they know to be unlikely, unnecessary, or ethically suspect.

ABSTRACT. We propose that readers studying multiple controversial texts use their prior beliefs to monitor the validity of incoming information. In the present experiment, we used the eye tracking method to study non-strategic and strategic validation processes during processing of belief-consistent and –inconsistent claims and reasons. First-pass reading times were longer for belief-inconsistent reasons (indicator of non-strategic validation). For look-backs as indicators of strategic reading, we found a preference for belief-consistent information.

ABSTRACT. Data is presented showing the validity of 2 subscales that can be used to assess epistemological beliefs of particular importance for multiple-document-inquiry tasks. The subscales show similar psychometric properties across grade-levels and for parallel versions worded for science and history. The subscales provided unique predictive utility for the quality of explanations that students constructed for two science topics that differed in difficulty. In particular, the integration subscale reflects a novel dimension of epistemological beliefs.

ABSTRACT. We examined the effect of popularity figures on psychology students' selection of bibliographical references. We assumed that high citation figures could "trump" the intrinsic relevance of the reference given a specific search phrase. Psychology students were asked to choose which of two references would seem the most relevant for various psychology topics. As expected, less relevant references were 3 times as likely to be selected when they were presented together with high citation figures.

ABSTRACT. Sourcing was examined as students used both traditional (e.g., newspaper) and digital (e.g., Wikipedia) source types to research a current events topic. Students were found to access document information less frequently when using digital rather than traditional source types. Further, accessing document information was found to increase ratings of traditional source types’ trustworthiness, while having no or the inverse effect for digital source types. Sourcing and ratings of text trustworthiness predicted response quality.

ABSTRACT. Attending to and evaluating source credibility is an important academic and professional competency, with important consequences for comprehension and learning. However, studies of sourcing suggest that most students tend to overlook source information. We examined instances of sourcing behavior in the context of a high-stakes argument evaluation task that included an embedded source. In contrast to prior work, most examinees engaged in a range of critical sourcing behaviors, and a majority elaborated specific expertise-related critiques.

ABSTRACT. In two studies of children’s understanding of multi-functional pronouns, it was shown that 8-year-old French children had greater problems understanding multi-functional pronouns (y and en) than subject pronouns (il/elle, le/la) when they were asked to specify what such pronouns meant or “stood for” in the text. The ability to understand multifunctional pronouns was predictive of reading comprehension over and above the contributions of word reading, syntax, vocabulary, non-literal understanding and competence with subject pronouns.

ABSTRACT. This study examines the effects of cohesion on text processing and comprehension. Participants read 64 three-clause sentences and identified the main referent in the clauses. The sentences varied in the type of demonstratives contained in the sentences and whether the referent was followed by a demonstrative determiner and noun or a demonstrative pronoun. Demonstrative pronouns led to significantly slower reading times and lower recall of the previous antecedent compared to nouns preceded by demonstrative determiners.

ABSTRACT. Processing negative-causal coherence relations is cognitively more demanding than processing positive-causal relations. A self-paced reading experiment examined whether increased processing costs are due to an immediate validation of the inconsistent information. The results indicate that the comprehension of negative-causal coherence relations involve the detection and later integration of inconsistent information into the mental model of the text. Furthermore, establishing coherence was facilitated when the connective occurred between sentences rather than initiated the first sentence.

ABSTRACT. We attempted to replicate the results of Gibbs, Bogdanovich, Sykes and Barr (1997) in a study exploring the role of conceptual metaphors in idiom processing. Participants read idioms and responded to target words in one of two lexical decision tasks: a 250 ms delay or no delay. Results showed no evidence supporting conceptual metaphor activation during idiom processing, but suggest that a conceptual theme facilitates faster reading time of a related target word.

ABSTRACT. Boundedness determines the durative nature of verb actions, such as being long (e.g., slept) or short (e.g., hit). Moreover, a verb also takes on a grammatical aspect when used. In our study of verb memory we showed a bias for people to misremember a verb’s aspect based on assuming that a described event was completed (and hence perfective). This was further influenced by the boundedness of the action conveyed by the verb.

ABSTRACT. Facilitated processing in the form of priming effects is common in language processing. Recent work indicates that when some information is repetition primed (facilitating processing), other information is antiprimed (impairing processing). We tested whether antipriming accompanies repetition priming in auditory word identification. In one experiment, antiprimed words were identified significantly slower than baseline, while primed words were identified significantly faster than baseline. A control experiment showed that antipriming does not occur without repetition priming.

ABSTRACT. We examined the benefit of interleaving the study of two different kinds of materials over massing them during study. The similarity of the materials is important for the magnitude of the effect. We found that the interleaving advantage was greater when the stimuli were highly similar (e.g., interleaving different bird categories) than when they were dissimilar (e.g., interleaving bird and painting categories).

ABSTRACT. The executive resource hypothesis assumes a positive relationship between resource availability and mind wandering (MW). We compared MW across different modalities of information delivery under the assumption that these modalities would differentially tax executive resources. An Audio only condition produced the most MW. Two conditions that presumably consumed more resources (i.e., Audio + Text and Self-paced reading) only differed when considering certain types of materials in conjunction with the pace of self-paced readers.

ABSTRACT. This study focuses on distinctive ways diversity is framed in U.S. higher education admissions processes. Based on an extensive review of literature, the discourses of student demography, neoliberalism, globalization, equity, academic excellence and pluralistic democratic education emerged as salient ways that diversity is constructed through recruitment practices. The study uses Critical Discourse Analysis, within a comparative case study, to demonstrate how specific discourses produce representations of diversity and create meanings about this term in college.

ABSTRACT. High and low Verbal Working Memory Span (VWMS) subjects participated in a novel verbal analogue of the WCST. Each participant read one control text, one text with widely separated coherence breaks, and one text with local coherence breaks on different topics. Recall for the low VWMS participants was more disrupted by the texts with local coherence breaks while recall for the low VWCST participants was more disrupted by the texts with widely separated coherence breaks.

ABSTRACT. The current experiment investigated how respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) could be leveraged as an online indicator of emotional interest during the comprehension of seductive and non-seductive scientific texts. Participants read a seductive and non-seductive science text on related topics, while reading times, proportional recalls, and RSA signals were collected. We predict that participants will demonstrated longer reading times and higher proportional recall for seductive details and that RSA will significantly predict comprehension.

ABSTRACT. We tested how textual cues affected participants’ assessment of information from unreliable sources. Participants read versions of The Telltale Heart that had been modified to manipulate the plausibility of events and the presence of character cues verifying the narrator’s claims about events. We asked participants to write their interpretation of the story and rate how much they believed information from the story. We found that our manipulations affected whether people believed information from unreliable sources.

ABSTRACT. Is information that is irrelevant to story characters less accessible? Using a directed-forgetting paradigm, a "Forget" group read about a character who decided to forget List 1 - items she didn’t need to purchase - but remember List 2. The "Remember" group needed them all. As with traditional directed forgetting, the Forget group recalled fewer List 1 words but more List 2 words than the Remember group. We conclude that a character’s memory influences processing.

ABSTRACT. Twitter is a popular micro-blogging service that allows users to post 140-character text messages known as tweets. It is a powerful tool for influencing opinions. The current project aims to determine the actual cognitive processes users engage in when they consume tweets, as predictors of opinion change. In this paper, we describe the findings of the first phase of the study in which we norm the tweet-arguments and questionnaires.

ABSTRACT. The purpose of our study is to examine expository texts used in an elementary science classroom and high school social studies classrooms to analyze structural complexity. In two separate studies, researchers examined students’ cognitive processing with these texts and identified that students with secure comprehension linked prior knowledge to new knowledge, creating a coherent mental representation of texts, but students with developing comprehension found it difficult to create even a text based understanding when reading.

ABSTRACT. The readability of context-dependent test items is frequently criticized. Using Cognitive Load Theory, we applied three principles for designing instructional material to tests for secondary education: reduce irrelevant information, avoid split attention, and provide just-in-time information. Experiment 1 showed that leaving out irrelevant information in context-dependent items results in higher scores. The eye-tracking results in experiment 2 showed that reading is facilitated when supportive information is provided before rather than after the contextual information.

ABSTRACT. The purpose of this study was to examine online processes used during reading that may contribute to comprehension. One hundred twenty-four fourth-grade students with proficient decoding but poor reading comprehension skills responded to narrative and informational texts using a think-aloud procedure. Analysis of think-aloud transcripts revealed that readers made significantly more text-based connections while reading narratives and more knowledge-based connections while reading informational texts. Findings have implications for further research on reading comprehension processes.

ABSTRACT. The grammatical phenomenon of gender is studied, through the MPF corpus of oral french, spoken by young suburban people. Possible evolution of the gender system in various idioms is presented, then the MPF corpus. Finally, the corpus' obsevations regarding gender in french are presented and discussed, in particular the fact that no improper gender agreement was obseved for inanimate nouns. It is remarkable that the gender system shows weaknesses only when it depends on sex.

ABSTRACT. When people communicate they coordinate their language in a variety of ways, including lexically. This coordination is crucial to establishing mutual understanding, yet the development of automated tools to assess language coordination has lagged. We introduce an automated metric that tracks the lexical similarity between two interlocutors as it evolves over the course of a conversation. We then apply this metric to a corpus of instant messaging data and find evidence for historical lexical entrainment.

ABSTRACT. Prior research demonstrated that using concept maps to search within an online scientific database decreases cognitive effort over more common keyword-based searches; our purpose was to determine whether there were also learning advantages, as measured by pretest and posttest essays. Gains in number of correct and incorrect ideas, as well as overall scores were analyzed. In addition, overall scores generated by human raters were compared to metrics generated by automated scoring systems – LSA and Coh-Metrix.

ABSTRACT. The purpose of this study is to examine potential biases in partner-adaptation during dialogue. Pairs of participants performed a matching task during which some of the pictures to describe had been mentioned during a previous interaction. The results revealed that the participants were biased toward producing initially self-presented words to describe these pictures. This is in line with the idea that speakers have difficulty accessing part of the memory representations necessary for partner-adaptation during dialogue.

ABSTRACT. The prevalence and organization of corridor conversations were studied in a hospital clinic. Based on 59 hours of videorecordings on five weekdays, conversations were found to occur at a rate of every 3.89 min on average. Conversations were brief, mobile (staff rarely stopped while talking), and overwhelmingly focused on professional topics. The qualitative analysis of two cases of brief and longer conversations illustrâtes how they are organized and their potential role in coordinating clinical work.

ABSTRACT. Making sense of conflicting written claims (e.g., about a particular event or phenomenon) is a challenging task, especially for secondary school students (Braasch et al., 2013). Source characteristics (i.e., who precisely provided each statement) may be used to restore coherence between conflicting statements, and to evaluate the respective validity of the claims (Bråten, Strømsø, & Britt, 2009; Stadtler & Bromme, 2014). However, previous research showed that such source integration processes to resolve textual discrepancies develop from 7th grade to college (de Pereyra, Belkadi, Marbach, & Rouet, 2014): younger students pay less attention to sources during reading, and use less source information in their summaries of conflictual stories. The factors and skills triggering the development of source comprehension remain largely to be identified (Stadtler et al., submitted).

The present research aimed at investigating whether students' epistemic beliefs (i.e., representations about knowledge) and reading skills (i.e., reading speed and vocabulary range) would predict students use of sources when dealing with texts featuring conflicting claims about a situation. Previous research has linked students' sourcing and their beliefs towards knowledge (Bråten, Britt, Strømsø, & Rouet, 2011).

We propose that students' epistemic position towards claim conflicts (i.e., can two people who disagree be both right? See Kuhn, Cheney, & Weinstock, 2000) may also condition their effective use of source information. We predicted that an evaluative epistemic position towards claim conflicts (i.e., the view that claims validity depends on the sources and on their argumentation) would be associated with more sourcing than a multiplist position (i.e., claims are only a matter of beliefs) or an absolutist position (i.e., only one claim can be right).

Method

Participants. One hundred twenty-one 7th graders (53% female, average age 12.9 years), one hundred nine 9th graders (53% female, average age 14.8 years), and seventy-three undergraduates (85% female, average age 19.2 years) participated as part of classroom activities or for course credit.

Materials. Eight short fictitious pieces of news were written. Each story contained a context sentence (e.g., presenting a local football team), a sentence introducing the first source and her statement about a critical event (e.g., a supporter claiming the football team won its last three matches), a sentence introducing the second source and her statement, which was either consistent or discrepant with the first one (e.g., the team coach claiming the team won vs. lost its last three matches), and a concluding sentence (e.g., the context of the next match). Four filler stories as well as 2 practice stories were added to the eight critical stories. A question on the critical event was written for each story (e.g., "did the football team win or lose its three last matches?").

We adapted the epistemic position assessment task by Kuhn et al. (2000), which features short scenarios in which two characters disagree about a range of topics. Participants had to select a global position towards the scenario (i.e., absolutist, multiplist, or evaluatist). A standard reading fluency task (Lefavrais, 1968) was also used as a control measure.

Procedure. The experiment was run in groups ranging from 4 to 25 participants in a single one-hour session. Critical stories and fillers were presented in a booklet. Each participant read 4 consistent and 4 discrepant critical stories. After reading a story, the participant had to write an answer to the question about the critical event. After they read all stories and answered all questions, participants took the epistemological position assessment task, then the reading fluency task.

Results

At all grade levels, participants made very few references to sources when reporting the critical event of consistent stories (i.e., an average of 1% of the reports). However, when reporting about discrepant stories, references to sources significantly increased with grade (7th graders: 13%; 9th graders: 26%; undergraduates: 46%; 7th < 9th: p < .01; 9th < undergraduates: p < .01).

Participants’ scores to the reading skills test was normally distributed within each grade level, and significantly increased with grade (7th < 9th: p < .01; 9th < undergraduates: p < .01); however, even though the reading score overall positively predicted references to sources (p < .01), grade level was a significantly better predictor, and reading did not contribute a significant mediation between grade levels and references to sources.

The epistemic position task validity found in previous studies was confirmed in a cluster analysis: participants were distributed among absolutists (4% at all grade levels), multiplists (7th and 9th graders: 53%, undergraduates: 36%; p < .05), multiplists/evaluatists (7th and 9th graders: 33%, undergraduates: 51%; p < .05) and evaluatists (9% at all grade levels). However, these positions did not significantly predict references to sources, and no significant mediation was found between grade levels and references to sources.

Discussion

We replicated previous results showing that students' ability to use source information when dealing with conflicting claims develops from 7th grade to college. However, grade level was a better predictor for this behavior than reading skills or general epistemic beliefs towards conflicting claims. The latter was in fact not a significant predictor at all. Along with other recent works (Rouet et al., 2013), these observations support the view that sourcing skills may be more dependent to students’ representation of a reading task hic et nunc, rather than a global declarative and/or procedural competence. This latter assumption remains to be tested in future research.

References

Braasch, J. L. G., Bråten, I., Strømsø, H. I.,Anmarkrud, Ø., & Ferguson, L. E. (2013). Promoting secondary school students’ evaluation of source features of multiple documents. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 38(3), 180-195.

Bråten, I., Britt, M. A., Strømsø, H. I., & Rouet, J.-F. (2011). The role of epistemic beliefs in the comprehension of multiple expository texts: Towards an integrated model. Educational Psychologist, 46(1), 48-70.

Bråten, I., Strømsø, H. I., & Britt, M. A. (2009). Trust matters: Examining the role of source evaluation in students' construction of meaning within and across multiple texts. Reading Research Quarterly, 44(1), 6-28.

de Pereyra, G., Belkadi, S., Marbach, L., & Rouet, J.-F. (2014). Do teenage readers use source information when faced with discrepant information? Paper presented at the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse, Valencia, Spain, July 16-18.

Kuhn, D., Cheney, R., & Weinstock, M. (2000). The development of epistemological understanding. Cognitive Development, 25, 309-328.

Lefavrais, P. (1968). La Pipe et le Rat. L'évaluation du savoir-lire du cours préparatoire à l'enseignement supérieur et le facteur d'éducabilité PI [Pipe and Rat. Evaluation of Reading from first grade to higher education and educability factor PI]. Issy-Les Moulineaux, France: Edition et Application Psychologique.

Rouet, J.-F., Ros, C., de Pereyra, G., Macedo-Rouet, M., & Salmerón,L. (2013). Teenagers' developing awareness of source quality.Paper presented at the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse, Valencia (Spain), July 16-18, 2013.

Stadtler, M., & Bromme, R. (2014). The content–source integration model: A taxonomic description of how readers comprehend conflicting scientific information. In D. N. Rapp & J. Braasch (Eds.), Processing Inaccurate Information: Theoretical and Applied Perspectives from Cognitive Science and the Educational Sciences (pp. 379-402). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Stadtler, M., de Pereyra, G., Paul, J., Potocki, A., Salmeron, L., Macedo-Rouet, M., Bromme, R., & Rouet, J.-F. (submitted). The sources of (non)sourcing while reading: A framework for studying the development of source evaluation abilities.

ABSTRACT. Recent research links the role of presidential personality to leaders’ choices in foreign policy options. This paper extends this previous work in two ways: by lengthening the timeline of analysis from the previous work, and by incorporating the link between presidential language and personality. Using computational linguistic measures such as Coh-Metrix and LIWC, we evaluate the language used by US presidents in State of the Union speeches between the years 1789-2000 alongside their personality ratings.

ABSTRACT. Kendeou, Walsh, et al. (2014) demonstrated a persistent memory benefit of refutation text in the knowledge revision process after a one-month delay. Our design did not allow us to rule out any contribution of the testing effect. The present research varied test time and frequency in order to examine any impact of the testing effect. Results indicated no significant testing effect; we argue that the enhanced LTM benefit is the result of the refutation text.

ABSTRACT. Although general world knowledge is always passively activated, readers are not always disrupted upon encountering information that can occur in a fictional narrative but not in the real world. The results of three experiments demonstrated that enhancing the representation of the text mitigated the interfering effects of real-world expectations from general world knowledge when reading fictional narratives. These results are discussed within the framework of the RI-Val Model (Cook & O’Brien, 2014) of text comprehension.

ABSTRACT. Research suggests literary novices are inept at interpreting literary works (Graves & Frederiksen, 1991; Zeitz, 1994). The current study investigated novices’ literary interpretations for a short story. Results indicated more interpretations when prompted than during initial reading despite evidence of elaborative processing, attention to literary devices, and adequate story comprehension. Furthermore, elaborative processing was positively related to interpretations. These results implicate differences between experts and novices in what is entailed in “reading” a literary work.

ABSTRACT. This study investigated how actively the speaker engages in taking stances (Du Bois 2007) in oral narrative. By surveying narrative transcripts of approximately 74,000 words, it shows that the discourse marker well marks two central modes of stancetaking in local- and broad-spectrum scope as a meta-stance marker, managing stance relations in the course of narrative development where the stances of narrator, characters, and speaker are negotiated and dynamically interwoven.

ABSTRACT. We present experiments that examined the impact of because on integration. In one study, we examined the role of because on the integration of ideas either uttered by one speaker or by two different speakers. In another, we compared integration across statements, when the antecedent appeared in either the same sentence as the connective or in an earlier sentence. The results suggest that because may decrease integration if other processing elicits a cognitive load.

ABSTRACT. Recent studies have produced conflicting evidence about whether an object’s semantic size influences word recognition. We monitored participants’ eye movements as they read target words representing small and large objects embedded in sentence contexts. Results indicated that semantic size does not impact word recognition processes; rather, information about semantic size is validated against the preceding discourse context at a later stage of processing. This is consistent with predictions made by the RI-Val model of comprehension.

ABSTRACT. How can a reader anticipate the end of a story he or she cannot predict? I frame the phenomenon of evolving interpretation using two disciplines: creative writing practice and knowledge representation. A story integrates inferences from multiple contexts, changing the relationships between them as its text progresses. This research explored how incompatibilities between such contextual inferences can drive a story, extracting three key characteristics, and extending methods of knowledge representation to illustrate them.

ABSTRACT. This study examined the role of causal, additive and adversative connectives and causal connectivity in spoken and written discourse comprehension. Participants listened to or read a radio interview, with or without connectives. Readers recalled more statements than listeners. Statements that had many causal connections were recalled more often than those with fewer connections, especially when they were read. There was an interaction between connective presence, type of connection and modality of presentation.

ABSTRACT. The importance of affective-motivational factors (self efficacy, value of writing, writing apprehension, external motivation and internal motivation) in Chinese writing was investigated among 132 Chinese students in Grade 3 and Grade 5. Multiple regression analysis results showed that only value of writing and identified regulation contributed unique variance to Chinese written composition after controlling for the contribution of cognitive-linguistic measures. These underscore the affective-motivational characteristics of Chinese learners and help inform Chinese writing instruction.