The Availability of Causal Information during Reading.

We conducted five experiments to examine readers’ access to backgrounded causal information in the absence of a local coherence break. Participants read surprise‐ending stories in which some story actions were explained by information in the preceding context, as well as information about the protagonist's ulterior motives disclosed in the story's conclusion. Some participants received information about the story's ending before reading the story, whereas other participants received no prior information. We found that participants who received prior knowledge about the story exhibited longer reading times for actions relevant to this knowledge, used this knowledge to explain the actions, and recalled more ideas from the story than did participants with no prior knowledge. We discuss the implications of these results for evaluating the constructionist model of inferential processing.

[1]  T. Trabasso,et al.  Constructing inferences during narrative text comprehension. , 1994 .

[2]  Jason E. Albrecht,et al.  Comprehension strategies in the development of a mental model. , 1992, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[3]  Roger Ratcliff,et al.  Inference during reading. , 1992 .

[4]  E. J. O'Brien,et al.  Maintaining global coherence during reading , 1994 .

[5]  Walter Kintsch,et al.  Knowledge Organization and Text Organization , 1987 .

[6]  T. Trabasso,et al.  Minimal or Global Inference during Reading , 1994 .

[7]  J. M. Golding,et al.  A test of the on-line status of goal-related inferences , 1992 .

[8]  T. Trabasso,et al.  Inferences during Reading: Converging Evidence from Discourse Analysis, Talk-Aloud Protocols, and Recognition Priming , 1993 .

[9]  J. Hummel,et al.  Causality and the allocation of attention during comprehension. , 1990, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[10]  Charles A. Perfetti,et al.  Why inferences might be restricted , 1993 .

[11]  E. J. O'Brien,et al.  When comprehension difficulty improves memory for text. , 1985 .

[12]  T. Trabasso,et al.  Causal thinking and the representation of narrative events , 1985 .

[13]  Arthur C. Graesser,et al.  Goal, Event, and State Inferences: An Investigation of Inference Generation During Story Comprehension , 1990 .

[14]  Marcia K. Johnson,et al.  Contextual prerequisites for understanding: Some investigations of comprehension and recall , 1972 .

[15]  Richard E. Mayer,et al.  Twenty years of research on advance organizers: Assimilation theory is still the best predictor of results , 1979 .

[16]  S. Newell,et al.  Winner Takes all , 1996 .

[17]  M. McDaniel,et al.  Material-appropriate processing: A contextualist approach to reading and studying strategies , 1989 .

[18]  Mark A. McDaniel,et al.  Encoding difficulty and memory: toward a unifying theory , 1986 .

[19]  M. Singer,et al.  Inferring consequences in story comprehension , 1983 .

[20]  Jason E. Albrecht,et al.  Role of context in accessing distant information during reading. , 1995, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[21]  W. Kintsch.  The role of knowledge in discourse comprehension: a construction-integration model. , 1988, Psychological review.

[22]  T. Trabasso,et al.  Logical necessity and transitivity of causal relations in stories , 1989 .

[23]  J. L. Myers,et al.  Connecting goals and actions during reading. , 1993, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[24]  J. M. Golding,et al.  Superordinate goal inferences: Are they automatically generated during comprehension? , 1993 .

[25]  D. Dooling,et al.  Effects of comprehension on retention of prose , 1971 .

[26]  J. Keenan,et al.  The effects of causal cohesion on comprehension and memory , 1984 .

[27]  John D. Bransford,et al.  Considerations of some problems of comprehension. , 1973 .

[28]  Jason E. Albrecht,et al.  Updating a mental model: maintaining both local and global coherence , 1993 .

[29]  Mark A. McDaniel,et al.  Encoding and recall of texts: The importance of material appropriate processing , 1990 .

[30]  D. Ausubel.  The use of advance organizers in the learning and retention of meaningful verbal material. , 1960 .

[31]  Jonathan M. Golding,et al.  Methodological Issues In Evaluating The Occurrence of Inferences , 1990 .

[32]  Arthur C. Graesser,et al.  A three-pronged method for studying inference generation in literary text , 1991 .