Inference Generation 1 RUNNING HEAD : READER GOAL AND INFERENCE GENERATION Reading purpose , type of text and their influence on think-alouds and comprehension measures

There are variations in the extent to which particular types of inferences or activations are made during reading (G. McKoon & R. Ratcliff, 1992; M. Singer, 1994). In this study, the authors investigated the influence of reading purpose (for entertainment or study) on inference generation. Participants read 2 texts aloud and 2 texts for comprehension measures. Reading purpose did not influence off-line behavior (comprehension) but did influence on-line reader behavior (thinking aloud). Readers with a study purpose more often repeated the text, acknowledged a lack of background knowledge, and evaluated the text content and writing than did readers with an entertainment purpose. This pattern was stronger for the expository text than for the narrative text. Reading purpose, and possibly text type, affects the kinds of inferences that readers generate. Hence, inferential activities are at least partially under the reader’s strategic control. Reader Goal and Inference Generation 2 The Influence Of Reading Purpose On Inference Generation And Comprehension In Reading In this article we examine the influence of reading purpose on the type of inferential activities that readers perform. More specifically, we examine the effects of a particular reading purpose or orientation, that is, for study or entertainment, on comprehension behaviors during reading. There is considerable research on inference generation in reading. Some investigations are based on speeded techniques in which one element is probed for activation during reading (e.g., O'Brien, Shank, Myers, & Rayner, 1988; Graesser, Singer, & Trabasso, 1994; see Singer, 1994, for a review). Other investigations of inference generation elicit think-aloud protocols in which a continuous record of inferences is produced (e.g., Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995; Trabasso & Suh, 1993; Trabasso & Magliano, 1996; Zwaan & Brown, 1996). In think-aloud research, readers have demonstrated a variety of reactions to text (Pressley & Afflerbach; 1995). Trabasso and Magliano (1996) identified three kinds of working memory operations occurring in think-aloud protocols: activation of relevant world knowledge, maintenance of information in working memory, and retrieval of text and prior thoughts from long-term memory. They noted that these were functionally necessary to the three kinds of inferences that they found: backward inferences (explanations), concurrent inferences (associations), and forward inferences (predictions) (see also van den Broek, 1990). The three kinds of inferences are explained as follows. Explanations concern the reasons why something occurs, such as a motive, physical cause, or enabling condition. These are generated in a wide variety of reading situations (e.g., Trabasso, van den Broek, & Suh, 1989; van den Broek, Fletcher, & Risden, 1993). Associations provide information on the features and functions of persons, objects, and events in the text. There is considerable evidence that associative inferences are not routinely generated during normal reading (e.g., Graesser, Singer, & Trabasso, 1994; McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992). Predictions occur when readers make inferences about future consequences of a focal event. Predictive inferences are hard to measure and are not often found except when a coherence break is resolved (Murray, Klin, & Myers, 1993), when the prediction is causally constrained within the text (Murray et al., 1993), or when the prediction is specifically foregrounded in the text (Whitney, Ritchie, & Crane, 1992). There are variations in the extent to which particular types of inferences or activations are made (McKoon & Ratcliff, 1986; Singer, 1994), and researchers have become increasingly interested in determining exactly which circumstances lead to particular inferences. A considerable number of studies have focused on the effects of reader characteristics on inferential activity. For example, inferences have been found to differ as a function of language skill (Horiba, 1990; Horiba, van den Broek, & Fletcher, 1993; Zwaan & Brown, 1996), reading ability (Wolman, 1991; Wolman, van den Broek, & Lorch, 1997), and background knowledge— e.g., readers with expert background knowledge do more explaining (Chi, Feltovich, & Glaser, 1981; Chiesi, Spilich, & Voss, 1979) and analysis (e.g., Lundeborg, 1987; Wineberg, 1991). Whereas these studies have focused on differences between readers, much less attention has been given to the possibility that inferential activities also may differ within an individual reader. One likely factor in determining intra-individual variation in the pattern of inferential activity during reading concerns reading purpose (e.g., Walker & Meyer, 1980). A critical role for reading purpose on the comprehension process is implicated by findings that orientation to Reader Goal and Inference Generation 3 (or goal while reading) the text during reading influences recall (e.g., Pichert & Anderson, 1977; Anderson & Pichert, 1978). Furthermore, readers claim to modify their reading strategies according to reading goal. For example, Lorch, Lorch and Klusewitz (1993) asked readers what kinds of different reading tasks they experienced and how they perceived the processing demands for the different types of reading tasks. The participants broadly distinguished two categories of reading tasks, reading for school (study) purposes and reading for stimulation/entertainment. School reading was perceived as less interesting, slower, and involving less anticipation of future text events, involving more attempts at integration, more rereading, and as more taxing of understanding and memory. In contrast, reading for entertainment was perceived to involve an increased effort to find relations among ideas and events in the text, more anticipation of forthcoming text events, more interest, and more analysis of writing style. Lorch et al. (1993) provide a rich description of text types and reader perception of their demands. It is unclear, however, what readers actually do when they read with different purposes in mind. The aim of the current study is to assess inferences readers make under different reading orientations. To do so, we contrast reading for entertainment and reading for study. These two purposes reflect the most frequent distinction that readers make in their introspections about their own reading behaviors (Lorch et al., 1993) and thus are likely to evoke differences in inferential behaviors. If readers are sensitive to the purposes with which they read and are able to modulate their comprehension activities accordingly, we would expect differences in the inferences that are generated. It is also possible, however, that readers do not adjust their comprehension activities according to their purposes. This is likely to occur, for example, if inference generation is largely automatic and/or bottom-up (i.e., text driven; McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992). In this case, no differences would occur. Differences in inference generation may be quantitative or qualitative. One possibility is that a particular purpose for reading affects the overall amount of inferential activity but not the types of inferences that are generated. It is also possible, however, that reading purpose influences how the reader allocates his/her attention and hence what types of inferences are generated. For example, on the basis of readers’ introspections one would expect a study purpose to result in slower reading and a greater number of text-based inferences than with an entertainment purpose (Lorch et al., 1993). Detailed analyses of the patterns of inference generation allow us to evaluate each of these possible scenarios: no differences, quantitative differences, or qualitative differences. Our primary interest is in the comprehension process as it takes place on-line, in other words, during actual reading. We use two measures for on-line processing, activities (during thinking aloud) and speed (reading time). The combination of measures makes it possible to obtain converging evidence. Because reading times and think-aloud responses cannot be measured at the same time, we measure them on separate sets of texts. Although of secondary importance in this study, we used two off-line measures, recall and responses to comprehension questions, to test readers’ representation of the texts once reading was completed. Again, we used two measures to provide converging evidence. In selecting materials for this study, we chose to include two different types of text, expository and narrative. Regardless of text type, reading task components such as translation of symbols to meaning and linguistic structures are the same as are the cognitive ‘hardand Reader Goal and Inference Generation 4 software’ such as background knowledge and working memory capacity of the individual. Indeed, although most evidence on inferential processes during reading are based on studies using experimenter-generated narrative texts, similar processing have been observed with expository texts (Goldman & Varma, 1996) and literary texts (van den Broek, Rohleder, & Narvaez, 1996). However, systematic differences in how people respond to different types of texts, particularly narrative versus expository texts, also have been observed (e.g., McDaniel, Einstein, Cunay & Cobb, 1986; Einstein, McDaniel, Owen, & Coté, 1990; Zwaan, 1994). By including texts of each type we allowed for the greatest generalizability of the results and hoped to obtain preliminary evidence for inference pattern similarities and differences between the text types.