Past research on anaphor resolution has investigated the availability of discourse information related to characters that part and reunite. Upon reunion, distant concepts that have been associated with the characters before they separated become more accessible than they were just before the reunion. This phenomenon has been referred to as the…

Two studies explored the conditions under which readers update their representation of news reports in the presence of alternative plausible explanations for a target event. To do so, this study asked readers to read news reports that mentioned 2 different causes to explain the occurrence of a single event. This study manipulated which of the 2…

Although knowledge-based inferences (Graesser, Singer, & Trabasso, 1994) depend on general knowledge, there may be differences across knowledge areas in how they support these processes. This study explored processing differences between 2 areas of knowledge (physical cause?effect vs. goals and planning) to establish (a) that each would support…

This study investigates the causal coherence of deaf students' written narratives and the relation between students' use of causal structures in narrative writing and their linguistic skills. The written narratives of 17 deaf high school students were compared with those of 2 groups of hearing writers: 17 high school students and 16 second…