ABSTRACT. We investigated how the continued influence of misinformation is affected by memory retrieval. After reading a news-like text that did or did not contain a false statement retracted later, participants performed either a free-recall test or a recognition test using either the false or true statement. The findings from two online experiments (total N = 597) indicate a small but significant continued influence effect that is not moderated by retrieval mode.

ABSTRACT. We examined the effectiveness of a comprehensive evaluation strategy training teaching sourcing and corroboration skills to young adolescents. It was compared to a control group receiving a declarative knowledge training on online misinformation. Data were collected at three points of measurement. Teaching evaluation strategies led to more discerning consumers of information who improved in distinguishing between sources of higher and lower trustworthiness, debunking false reports, and their knowledge of evaluation strategies.

ABSTRACT. This online-experiment investigated whether the effect of misinformation on readers’ subjective knowledge is affected by a repeated presentation of false facts within a text. Participants (N = 128), reproduced similar amounts of misinformation for facts that they had correct prior knowledge on, irrespective of whether the misinformation was presented once or twice within a fictional text. However, repeated presentation of misinformation did increase its negative effect on readers’ confidence for items with prior knowledge.

ABSTRACT. Recent research suggests a moderating effect of the document language on the text-belief-consistency effect when reading multiple texts about a controversy, due to the differences in the epistemic status of different languages. In this experiment we tested this hypothesis by examining German students reading controversial texts in their L1 German or in their L2 English. As expected, the text-belief-consistency effect occurred for the texts presented in German but not for those presented in English.

ABSTRACT. We tested whether a “truth sandwich” (i.e., presenting accurate information before and after an inaccurate claim) is effective for reducing misinformation effects. We presented stories centering on false claims that had a sandwich or simple refutation structure. A headline also highlighted the claim or its refutation. Participants read blocks of stories with a delay before a claim judgment task. Agreement with false claims was not affected by text structure, but was affected by headline content.

ABSTRACT. Research shows that evaluations of metacomprehension—one’s awareness of their understanding of a text—are greater when readers use cues reflective of comprehension processes. Meta-awareness—awareness of one’s own thoughts—could affect metacomprehension accuracy by influencing what cues are used when making metacomprehension judgments. The current study aims to examine the relationship between meta-awareness and metacomprehension. The findings suggest that readers that had greater metacomprehension accuracy were more likely to have more meta-aware, on-task thought.

ABSTRACT. The shallowing hypothesis suggest that leisure digital reading induces readers to develop a shallow mindset that hinders comprehension. In this study we analyse the potential mediating role of inhibitory control (ability to suppress irrelevant information) on the associations between print/digital reading habits and comprehension. We analyzed 2771 Primary school students (4-6th grade). The habit of reading texts on screen was negatively related to reading comprehension. Importantly, this relationship was fully mediated by inhibitory control.

ABSTRACT. Literature on adults suggests a disadvantage of digital over paper in learning tasks. This study investigates the difference between digital and paper modes and the role of cognitive control processes, i.e. Executive Functions (EF), in text reading and text writing on 175 school-age children. The results support the usefulness of digital devices for children with poor learning abilities and the role played by performance levels and EF in predicting reading and writing in both modalities.

ABSTRACT. To understand complex expository text, readers engage in metacognitive comprehension monitoring. Metacognitive monitoring is assumed to rely on cognitive abilities that decrease in later adulthood. We compared younger (n = 101; 18–29 years) and older adults (n = 108; 60–75 years) in their metacognitive monitoring with an inconsistency task. Younger adults reported more inconsistencies than older adults. These differences were mediated by differences in working memory updating, short-term memory, and verbal intelligence.

ABSTRACT. We examined age-related differences in comprehension monitoring in adults aged between 50 and 77 (N = 176; Mage = 63.81 years, SDage = 6.13). The number of detected inconsistencies in an inconsistency task served as an indicator of comprehension monitoring. Our findings indicate a moderate but steady decrease in comprehension monitoring, which was mediated via verbal intelligence. In addition to this negative effect of age, we found that educational attainment had a positive effect.

ABSTRACT. Recent research suggest that news adapts to social media by increasing subjectivity of the language. We investigated whether this is true by collecting and comparing Facebook posts and articles produced by major UK news sources. The data were analyzed using a newly developed machine learning subjectivity classifier trained on annotations of native speakers. The results show that Facebook news are more subjective than articles for popular sources, but for quality sources, the pattern is reversed.

ABSTRACT. Organisational responsibilities can bring power but also a degree of vulnerability and exposure. This leads to divergent predictions about the use of potentially sensitive language: power might license it, exposure might inhibit it. Data from a large corpus of organisational emails shows that people in positions of relative power tend to avoid potentially sensitive words suggesting that, in at least some circumstances, vulnerability is a more significant influence than power in organisational language use.

ABSTRACT. This paper introduces and assesses the mature version of the open-source tool: Tool for Automatic Measurement of Morphological Information (TAMMI 2.0). TAMMI 2.0 automatically assesses texts for features related to basic morpheme counts, morphological variety, morphological complexity, morpheme type-token counts, and variables found in the MorphoLex database (Sánchez-Gutiérrez et al., 2017) including morpheme frequency/length, morpheme family size counts and frequency, and morpheme hapax counts. The variables in TAMMI are validated in a readability modeling task.

ABSTRACT. Students have difficulties constructing explanations and arguments in scientific inquiry. The current study made use of McNeill et al.’s (2006) claim, evidence, and reasoning framework to elicit students’ competencies with constructing scientific explanations and engaging in argumentation and natural language processing algorithms to score students’ Claim-Evidence-Reasoning statements at a fine-grained level. The analysis showed that although students would benefit from greater support in all three components, they struggled the most with particular aspects of Reasoning.

ABSTRACT. We describe the results of a principal component analysis applied to 1,364 (independent) persuasive essays. Our objective is to characterize writing in terms of linguist and semantic features extracted using Natural Language Processing. The analysis revealed 8 components related to word familiarity, word choice, varied sentence structure, and cohesion, which explained 55% of the variance between essays. A stepwise linear regression revealed the components collectively accounted for 39% of variance in essay quality scores.

ABSTRACT. Discourse plays a critical role in the learning process as it allows us to effectively comprehend and disseminate new information about the world. Critically, the processes involved in discourse production and processing unfold over multiple temporal and spatial scales, which often interact in complex ways. In this talk, I will advocate that conceptualizing discourse as a complex, dynamic system can provide critical insights into the ways in which we communicate and learn. I will provide examples from recent research that examine the dynamic and multidimensional nature of discourse. I will then discuss ideas for future interdisciplinary work in this area.

ABSTRACT. The proliferation of the Internet has emphasized the need to evaluate the information we read. Evaluating source dimensions is an effective way to achieve it. However, this process appears challenging for adolescents. We investigated which factors played a part in this "sourcing" ability: word reading, working memory manipulation, and Advanced Theory of Mind (AToM). The results obtained from 76 eighth graders indicated that the AToM level played a role, particularly in intent detection.

ABSTRACT. We examined whether and how reading an explanation of reasons for change in scientific conclusions about COVID infection affects readers’ acceptance of the novel claim, scientists' perceived trustworthiness, and the perceived positivity of the change. Results showed that explaining the change had positive effects on readers’ claim agreement, claim correctness, and trustworthiness judgments, but not on the perceived positivity of the change. The effects of the change explanation were moderated by general trust in science.

ABSTRACT. As people more readily believe information from high-credibility sources, perceptions of source credibility can have significant impacts on public health. However, less is known about determinants of credibility for climate and health scientists. Therefore, we examined how expertise and trustworthiness influence perceived source credibility of scientists. Overall, perceived credibility of climate and health scientists was determined by complex interactions between expertise and trust – which may impact the believability of the information scientists convey.

ABSTRACT. This study examines the unique and combined contribution of cognitive and metacognitive sourcing prompts for promoting students' source evaluation performance. Surprisingly, the metacognitive prompts did not contribute to students' source evaluation and even had detrimental effects. In contrast, the cognitive prompts increased awareness of sourcing criteria. Combining cognitive and metacognitive prompts did not appear to have an added-value. The findings suggest that cognitive prompts might be more effective because they cue attention to sourcing criteria.

ABSTRACT. We investigated how study sequence of untrustworthy and trustworthy information sources affects learners’ ability to recognize the dimensions of trustworthiness, expertise and benevolence, and to evaluate information sources. Upper and lower secondary students studied untrustworthy and trustworthy sources either interleaved (ABABA, ABABA) or blocked (AAAAA, BBBBB). Interleaving fostered upper secondary students' but not lower secondary students' ability to reliably discern untrustworthy and trustworthy sources.

ABSTRACT. We examined the impact of a metacognitive training on mind-wandering behavior, reading times, and comprehension in a pre-post training design with an active control group. After metacognitive training, participants showed a lower frequency of mindless reading and less irregularity in their reading times (i.e., reading too fast or slow). The results provide a step toward developing an objective measure of mindless reading and emphasize the importance of teaching metacognitive strategies to improve reading performance.

ABSTRACT. Proficient academic reading (PAR) is essential to academic success. However, students enter college with a range of reading proficiencies, placing some at risk of academic failure. In this study, we administered several different kinds of tests and evaluated which did the best job of identifying students at risk academically and, for those, the nature of their academic risks. We analyzed results using regression and ROC Curve analyses to identify the most efficient assessments to use.

ABSTRACT. This pilot study investigated whether undergraduates with different levels of prior knowledge experience conceptual growth and change in physics after reading a thought experiment text, refutation text, and standard expository text. Twenty-four undergraduates read text explanations and took the Force Concept Inventory to assess physics knowledge. Trends suggested that low prior knowledge undergraduates learn more physics from reading thought experiment and refutation texts, but high prior knowledge undergraduates learn equally from all three text types.

ABSTRACT. In the present study we explored the relation between reading habits, empathy (affective and cognitive empathy and theory of mind) and pro-social behaviour in children (8- 10-year-olds). The results showed that the measures of empathy (but not theory of mind) were related to pro-social behaviour. The relation between reading habits and pro-social behaviour was significant. This relation was mediated by a measure of affective, but not cognitive, empathy.

ABSTRACT. We report the results of a quasi-experimental intervention study aimed at fostering vocational school students' purposeful reading skills. In collaboration with a group of teachers, instructional resources were developed to explicitly train a set of purposeful reading sub-processes (e.g., task model, scanning, information evaluation). Their effectiveness was assessed in a quasi-experimental trial. The first results obtained with 237 students appear promising and will be completed by the time of the conference.

ABSTRACT. The editors of Discourse Processes will engage the conference participants in a discussion about studies they would like to see replicated and things that should be considered if one would like to run a proper replication study. The Editors will also be available to answer any questions conference participants may have related to replication studies, the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) guidelines Discourse Processes recently adopted, and any other questions about publishing in the journal.

ABSTRACT. The spread of online misinformation in social media is increasingly perceived as a problem for societal cohesion and democracy. The role of political leaders has attracted less research attention, even though politicians who “speak their mind” are perceived by segments of the public as authentic and honest even if their statements are unsupported by evidence or facts. Analyzing communications by members of the U.S. Congress on Twitter between 2011 and 2022, we show that politicians’ conception of truth has undergone a distinct shift, with authentic but evidence-free belief-speaking becoming more prominent and more differentiated from evidence-based truth-seeking. For Republicans—but not Democrats—an increase of belief-speaking of 10% is associated with a decrease of 12.8 points of quality (using the NewsGuard scoring system) in the sources shared in a tweet. An increase in truth-seeking language is associated with an increase in the quality of sources for both parties. We also show that the conception of truth expressed by politicians sets the tone of the ensuing conversation with members of the public on Twitter. The results support the hypothesis that the current dissemination of misinformation in political discourse is in part driven by a new understanding of truth and honesty that has replaced reliance on evidence with the invocation of subjective belief.

ABSTRACT. This study examined whether inference skills can be improved by training them with videos instead of written text. Fourth-grade children were assigned to a video-based inference training, a text-based version of the same training, or a no-training control group. Preliminary results showed that both training programs did not improve children’s inference skills with texts and videos. We are currently exploring potential explanations, such as validity of our pretest and posttest and the fidelity of implementation.

ABSTRACT. Two studies examined the effect of meta-information about the truthfulness and discriminability of true and false sentences on memory. Participants read an event description in which sentences were randomly presented as true or false. Study 1 showed that the presence of meta-information affected recognition memory for false but not for true sentences. Study 2 showed that the correct classification was reduced when true and false sentences were difficult to distinguish, regardless of the source.

ABSTRACT. This study examined the promotion of source evaluation skills in a computer-supported collaborative setting. We experimentally varied whether participants (N = 118 young adults), who completed internet search tasks in dyads, were supported by a collaboration script and were prompted to reflect on their collaboration. Scripting led to more evaluations during internet search and knowledge of source evaluation strategies. However, no effects were found for the ability to discriminate between more and less reliable sources.

ABSTRACT. We tested the effectiveness of a task-model scaffolds to improve students’ learning. Students enrolled in an asynchronous online introductory psychology course were randomly assigned to either the task-model scaffolds or a business-as-usual section. Student completing the task-model scaffolds performed better on the final exam and applied activities than business-as-usual students. This shows the potential value of supporting students’ understanding the role of theories and studies in psychology and how to learn and apply that information.

ABSTRACT. We examined the effect of source information and sourcing instructions on comprehension of multiple psychology texts. Postsecondary students were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: source + instructions, source-only, or no-source (control). We measured text comprehension with recall and recognition questions, both on the same day as reading and one week later. Recognition response scores did not differ by condition or time of test. A thematic analysis of open-response essays is currently being conducted.

ABSTRACT. Attentional processes behind comic books reading need more research. We made the hypothesis that seeing many panels at once improves understanding. Sixty participants read two comics excerpts with different grid layouts. We manipulated the number of visible panels at once. We measured reading performance and prior reading expertise. Our results did not show an effect of panels’ visibility manipulation. In contrast, we found that prior reading experience improves reading performance for both of our excerpt.

ABSTRACT. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many scientific conclusions changed. This study shows that epistemic perspectives predicted evaluations of change in claims about COVID transmission, controlling for knowledge about COVID and claims regarding its transmission, and trust in COVID-scientists. Participants displaying evaluativism maintained that scientists who changed their minds were trustworthy and viewed change in scientific claims as a positive part of science. In contrast, participants displaying multiplism thought change reveals a weakness of science.

ABSTRACT. This study examined the impact of the emotional content of narrative texts on the way 10 years old children scanned the texts to answer questions. Children made fewer errors when scanning emotionally-negative texts than when scanning positive texts, particularly for inferential questions. Eye-tracking data revealed that children’s average gaze durations were longer for negative texts than for positive texts, which suggests that children searched more carefully for the answers within texts with negative emotional content.

ABSTRACT. This study investigates to what extent interlocutors converge regarding the type of conversational discourse unit used as dialogue progresses. The focus is on specific sequences in a task-oriented dialogue (describing and drawing novel 2D objects in turn) when speakers undertake a similar action at a given sequential position. It was found that interlocutors systematically endeavoured to be similar to their dialogic partner in terms of the choice of unit type to conduct instruction.

ABSTRACT. Research suggests that time spent reading has a positive relationship with global reading comprehension (Locher & Pfost, 2020), whereas video game playing has no relationship (Lieury et al., 2014). The present study replicated these findings but also showed which components of reading were related to time spent reading. Specifically, time spent reading was positively related to beginning readers’ letter/word identification, knowledge integration, vocabulary, and working memory but was unrelated to phonological decoding, syntax, and intelligence.

ABSTRACT. Assessment of skills beyond knowledge acquisition, such as interpersonal communication in digital environments remains a challenge. In the current research, we combine two complementary analytic techniques, Group Communication Analysis, a computational methodology that quantifies temporally sensitive sociocognitive processes, with SNA. The proposed approach is named socio-cognitive communication and interpersonal positioning (SCIP). Our results highlight how the unity of temporally sensitive discourse and structural analyses enables SCIP to identify learner roles adopted in open learning settings.

ABSTRACT. The extended “digital natives” assumption considers that the current generation of higher education students feel comfortable and competent studying and using digital documents. Before the pandemic, several studies determined a general preference for reading in print formats. Will this preference remain after coming back to normal? We will answer this question regarding Spanish higher education students, and we will explore how individual factors, such as ICT use and ICT self-efficacy contribute to these preferences.

ABSTRACT. A consistent finding has been that readers are impacted by source information only if the reader is instructed to attend and use that information. Further, false information is pervasive and continues to have an impact on a reader’s memory in moment-to-moment text processing. The current experiments provide evidence that non-credible source information and false information can be sufficiently elaborated on in the text so that the information has less of an influence on moment-to-moment processing.

ABSTRACT. A crucial skill to ensure successful communication is the ability to take into consideration common ground (i.e., information mutually known by both conversational partners) to produce well-adapted and easily understandable messages during dialogue. The goal of our study is to understand better the cognitive mechanisms (conversational memory, executive functioning, theory of mind) underlying the use of common ground through an experimental research in normal aging.

ABSTRACT. We investigated the effect of pragmatic ambiguity on immediate and delayed comprehension. 44 postgraduate students were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: non-ambiguous vs. ambiguous text. We created an expository text and then made it ambiguous by replacing literal with idiomatic expressions. We used a Tobii Pro Nano to collect participants eye movement during reading. While ambiguity did not directly impact reading performance, ambiguous expressions seemed to trigger more processing than literal expressions.

ABSTRACT. A 3X2 between-subject design investigated how social cues (i.e., feedback provider and language) affect non-cognitive aspects of feedback effectiveness (i.e., motivation, self-efficacy, emotions, provider/feedback perceptions). We differentiated between artificially intelligent agents, educators, and peers as well as personalised and neutral language. Analysing the data from N = 98 teacher students revealed that the AI was perceived more trustworthy than humans. The practical and theoretical relevance of social and non-cognitive aspects in feedback interactions is discussed.

ABSTRACT. Characterisation of facial gestures has so far relied on qualitative methods with manual coding of facial action units. Depth cameras provide an opportunity to precisely quantify the extent, onset and offset of real-time facial action unit movement for different facial gestures. Combined with cluster analysis, this methodology can enable a systematic characterisation of facial gestures in large corpora, facilitating more accurate, frame-by-frame multimodal analysis of gesture-speech combinations.

ABSTRACT. Though it is the third most spoken home language in the United States and the sixth globally, research on how educators with Arabic-English multilingual students utilize translanguaging remains limited. Using qualitative and quantitative analytic approaches, this study explores how teachers in a seventh-grade U.S. classroom utilize translanguaging and dialogic practices with Arabic-speaking heritage language learners. We highlight findings related to language practices with Arabic-speaking heritage language learners and their teachers in whole-classroom discussions.

ABSTRACT. The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in dramatic changes to the way we communicate with others. In-person communication was significantly reduced and replaced by technology-mediated communication. Here, we present young women’s perceptions of technology-mediated interactions during the pandemic, as emerging research reveals that they may be a particularly vulnerable population. Our study sheds light on how they use technology to communicate with others, how technology impacts meaningful communication, and how to design future applications to support communication.

ABSTRACT. How does mental load (ML) affect collaboration between dialogue partners? Using puzzle games, we investigated the awareness of the other’s ML by examining the impact of experienced and perceived ML on collaboration. The results revealed that when participants were aware of each other’s ML, participants who were under low ML produced more feedback markers when their partner was under high ML, highlighting the contribution of one's own and one’s partner's state of mind on collaboration.