What can eye movements reveal about reading, a complex skill ubiquitous in everyday life? Research suggests that gaze can reflect short-term comprehension for facts, but it is unknown whether it can measure long-term, deep comprehension. We tracked gaze while 147 participants read long, connected, informative texts and completed assessments of…

Reading comprehension is key to knowledge acquisition and to reinforcing memory for previous information. While reading, a mental representation is constructed in the reader's mind. The mental model comprises the words in the text, the relations between the words, and inferences linking to concepts in prior knowledge. The automated model of…

Universidad Tecnológica de Santiago (UTESA) is a university considered as one of the highest ranking universities in the Dominican Republic, it is one of the few to be recognized by the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology as an autonomous university for its constant research and updating. This university offers to college students…

One crucial property of verbal jokes is that the punchline usually contains an incongruency that has to be resolved by updating the situation model representation. In the standard pragmatic model, these processes are considered to require cognitive effort. However, only few studies compared jokes to texts requiring a situation model revision…

This study aims to understand how EFL learners in different reading proficiency levels comprehend L2 texts, using five-component skills involving measures of (1) vocabulary knowledge, (2) drawing inferences and predictions, (3) knowledge of text structure and discourse organization, (4) identifying the main idea and summarizing skills, and (5)…

Studies investigating individual differences in reading ability often involve data sets containing a large number of collinear predictors and a small number of observations. In this article, we discuss the method of Random Forests and demonstrate its suitability for addressing the statistical concerns raised by such data sets. The method is…

People report recognizing discourse inferences at rates that approach target acceptance. Brainerd et al. [Brainerd, C. J., Wright, R., Reyna, V. F., & Mojardin, A. H. (2001). "Conjoint recognition and phantom recollection." "Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27", 307-329] proposed that…

Discusses the extent to which computers can understand natural language. Considers assertions that computers can be described as literate, and considers more generally the purpose of designing machines which perform like humans. (RS)

The core of schema theory is the concept that text is understood according to the reader's world knowledge and that this knowledge is altered whenever the reader encounters new information in print. Inferencing, that is the hypothesizing or predicting that the activation of schema sets in motion, is critical in this process. Recall is important…

Latent class modeling procedures were used in exploratory and confirmatory analyses of the prerequisite relations among five types of text-based inference question tasks for good and poor sixth-grade readers. All tasks types provided separate manifestations of the same underlying attribute for both good and poor readers. (Author/BS)

Describes how a teacher can model the inference process to help students learn to make inferences. (HOD)