How intuitively convincing readers find a text appears to be influenced by the valence and intensity of the emotions it elicits, and whether it feels easy to read. However, how these factors simultaneously contribute to convincingness is unclear. Therefore, we examined the simultaneous contributions of valence, arousal, and processing fluency to texts' perceived convincingness (how convincing readers find texts) and actual convincingness (the extent to which readers agree with the main claim). Adult native speakers of Dutch (N = 120) read 20 short persuasive texts, for which they rated experienced valence, arousal, and fluency, and either perceived or actual convincingness. All factors appear to be significant predictors of convincingness, with valence being the strongest, followed by arousal, while fluency played a smaller role. Our results nuance previous findings: valence and arousal play distinct, complex roles, whereas fluency appears to have a limited contribution. These results highlight the importance of investigating these factors simultaneously.
This study asks whether filled pauses actively engage attention and whether such engagement influences structural processing, measured through structural alignment. Participants orally described a series of pictures, then listened to a short informational passage and answered questions about it, and then described another series of pictures. Participants completed this twice: The first passage had double-object targets, and the second passage had passive targets. Critically, one of the passages contained filled pauses (before the verb in target sentences), and the other did not. We measured participants' pupil diameter in target sentences, an index of attention engagement, and pupil size synchrony, an index of moment-to-moment shared attention across observers. For speech with filled pauses compared to without, we found that pupil size was larger overall, peaking after the filled pause appeared, and higher synchrony across listeners. We interpret this as evidence that filled pauses actively engage attention. However, we did not detect a structural alignment effect in any condition, and thus found no evidence for an influence of filled pauses on structural processing (or, in another analysis, comprehension accuracy). These results suggest that filled pauses before the verb attract attention in the moment but do not influence downstream structural processing and general memory for content.
This study investigated the effects of different types of graphic organizers (GOs) on primary school students' text retention performance. Seventy-two students aged 8-10 years were randomly assigned to one of three groups: a control group viewing a text only, a group viewing the same text accompanied by a pre-filled GO, and a group viewing the text accompanied by the skeleton of a GO that students were required to fill in during the session. Unlike most previous research, this study was conducted with young children in a classroom setting to ensure ecological validity. Text retention was assessed immediately and after a delay, measuring both macrostructure and microstructure retention. Data were analyzed using ANOVAs. Consistent with our hypotheses, providing a pre-filled GO led to decreased retention of microstructure information relative to the control group, indicating a detrimental effect of pre-filled GOs on this type of information. In contrast, requiring students to actively filling-in the GO significantly enhanced their retention of critical macrostructure information compared to both the control and pre-filled GO groups. No significant differences were observed in students' perceived cognitive load. These findings support the generative learning theory, which posits that generative activities increase learner engagement and thereby improve performance.
Literary studies scholars have long debated whether the common practice of literary critical analysis influences the aesthetic experience of reading literary texts. In our experiment, we tested whether producing two types of alternative, creative response (compared to a default critical analysis response) influenced readers' aesthetic experience of contemporary, English-language, lyric poems. Results indicated that engagement in both critical analytic and creative response tasks increased the aesthetic experience of reading poems. Crucially, these effects were significantly modulated by task enjoyment. Participants who rated the given task higher evidenced a greater increase in their aesthetic experience of poems as a result, whereas those who disliked the task saw little increase or even a decrease in their aesthetic experience. These results suggest that the crucial factor for the aesthetic experience of poetic literature is not the nature of the task but the degree to which readers enjoy that task.
Self-efficacy is crucial for learning achievement and task performance, particularly when self-efficacy beliefs are aligned with actual performance (i.e. accurately calibrated self-efficacy). This study examined the association between self-efficacy and online credibility evaluation performance and whether these associations differ by grade level. Participants were 728 students (aged 10-17 years) in the 4th, 6th, 8th, and 10th grades who completed an online credibility evaluation task and a related self-efficacy measure. On average, students reported high self-efficacy in their ability to evaluate the credibility of online texts across grade levels. Structural equation modeling revealed a positive association between self-efficacy and online credibility evaluation performance when students evaluated more credible texts and a negative association for less credible texts. Grade level did not affect the strength of these associations. These findings suggest that students need support not only in developing strong credibility evaluation skills but also in accurately assessing their own performance.
Understanding discourse requires comprehenders to infer the relations between clauses and sentences. These discourse relations are thought to be constrained by discourse structure. This study investigates how the Right Frontier Constraint (RFC), a structural constraint that predicts how discourse units can attach to each other, affects discourse coherence expectations triggered by implicit causality (IC) verbs during online comprehension. Using a self-paced reading paradigm, we measured readers' processing times on explanatory continuations following IC verbs with either subordinating or coordinating intervening sentences. Our findings indicate that IC-driven expectations can be held across a subordinating intervening unit but are blocked by a coordinating unit, suggesting that the RFC rapidly influences how readers anticipate upcoming discourse. These results provide new evidence for the RFC and suggest that it is applied early enough to shape expectations during discourse processing.
The embodied approach to discourse comprehension is based on assumptions that are dramatically different from those of cognitive, or information-processing, theories. Nonetheless, the two can be brought together in a scientifically fruitful way: Embodiment provides an explanatory base for facts uncovered through cognitive research. This article begins with a critical appraisal of current cognitive theories and an argument for why the embodiment approach is necessary for theories of language comprehension. Then, multiple examples of rapprochement are developed. The first is how principles of embodied cognition enhance vocabulary learning. The second is a proposal for how the structure-building inferences necessary for comprehension are made. A third, speculative, rapprochement considers language development, disorders, and document models.
Promoting students' reading comprehension is a topic of interest for researchers and educators. One way to promote students' reading comprehension is to provide students with task instructions before reading (i.e. pre-reading task instructions). In this systematic review, we investigated the characteristics of studies that have focused on pre-reading task instructions and identified the associations between various pre-reading task instructions and reading comprehension. The findings revealed that pre-reading task instructions vary with respect to signaling reading content (content-focused), prompting reading strategy use (strategy-focused), specifying reading purpose (purpose-focused), and other factors (other-focused), all of which had distinct associations with reading comprehension. Specifically, content-focused instructions were generally associated with better memory performance, purpose-focused instructions were linked to improved memory and understanding based on specific tasks, and strategy-focused instructions tended to facilitate various levels of reading comprehension. Moreover, combining instruction types, such as pairing a purpose-focused instruction (e.g. "read to write an essay") with a strategy-focused instruction (e.g. "take notes"), was associated with cumulative or complementary benefits across comprehension measures. Process-level data, including reading time and verbal protocols, were also synthesized to explain these associations. The review concludes with a discussion of current research limitations and directions for future research.
Psycholinguistic research has provided abundant evidence that world knowledge has an immediate influence on the processing of explanatory discourse. However, less is known about which particular reasoning processes are immediately triggered as we integrate new information in causal discourse. The present study provides evidence from an experiment employing eye tracking during reading that different processing signatures can be observed for two types of triggering configurations for abductive reasoning. The two types of reasoning patterns involve partial explanations that would either contradict world knowledge (abductive anomaly) or cannot be predicted by such knowledge (abductive novelty). While abductive anomaly was more strongly associated with discourse backtracking, that is, reinspection of previous discourse, abductive novelty was associated with immediate integration difficulties, followed by inspection of subsequent discourse.
A complex sentence may indicate if the information it expresses is presupposed by the presence of an embedding verb. Factive verbs, such as "know," are presuppositional lexical triggers that presuppose their complements, whereas nonfactive verbs, such as "believe," do not. A special type of factivity verb, an alternating verb such as "remember," is ambiguous between factive and nonfactive readings. Theories differ on the proposed structural complexity of factivity verbs, and factors influencing the alternating verb's structural selection are poorly understood. Using eye tracking, this research investigates these questions by observing the verbs' parsing profiles in relation to theoretical predictions. The first experiment compares the parsing of complement structures selected by the Chinese factive verb (sic)(sic) (zh & imacr;d & agrave;o, "know") and the nonfactive verb (sic)(sic) (xi & amacr;ngx & igrave;n, "believe"), to ascertain which factivity structure takes longer to process. Using information gathered from the first, the second experiment investigates whether the ambiguous alternating verb (sic)(sic) (j & igrave;d & eacute;, "remember") is initially parsed as a factive/nonfactive, testing predictions from minimal attachment versus the principle of parsimony. Our results indicate that the factive zh & imacr;d & agrave;o incurs a lower processing cost than xi & amacr;ngx & igrave;n, suggesting that factive structures are less complex, and the alternating j & igrave;d & eacute;, when presented without context, has a nonfactive processing profile due to the parser adopting a meaning-based parse. The implications for the theory of factivity verbs and structural selection are discussed, along with the role of meaning guiding structural selection in the case of ambiguous alternating verbs.
According to relevance theory, communication relies on speakers' ability to signal relevant information, which addressees use to infer meaning efficiently. Most research within the relevance theoretic framework has examined how relevance is marked in speech, treating it as the primary channel for signaling informative content. Yet, little is known about whether, how, and in what contexts speakers highlight information in co-speech gestures. Here, we investigate how speakers use ostensive cues-specifically, visual and verbal deixis (e.g. gaze toward a gesture, demonstratives like "this," "that," or "here")-to highlight the communicative relevance of iconic gestures in child- versus adult-directed communication and whether addressees show sensitivity to these cues. Sixteen Italian adults explained the rules of two logic puzzles to a child and another adult. Results show that speakers highlight more gestures for children than for adults, primarily by using visual deixis. Furthermore, addressees of both age groups, adults and children, were more likely to shift their gaze to highlighted than to non-highlighted gestures. These findings demonstrate that speakers dynamically adapt multimodal cues to highlight iconic gestures for addressees, providing empirical support for extending relevance theory to a multimodal view of language.
The current study examined the effects of read-aloud with a refutational text on knowledge revision, attitudes toward learning, and perceived value of learning about a science topic (birds) in kindergarten and first-grade students. Each K-1 student (n = 86) in eight classes was randomly assigned to either a refutational (n = 42) or standard informational (n = 44) text condition. The results demonstrated, on average, that the refutational-text group performed better on the science topic knowledge measure at post-test and delayed post-test. This finding indicates the superiority of the refutational text in supporting knowledge revision in young students. Notably, the positive effect of the refutational-text read-aloud on knowledge revision was consistent among students, regardless of their levels of inhibition. In contrast, there were no significant differences between the two text groups in attitudes toward learning or in perceived value of learning about the topic.
The cognitive processes involved in understanding a story ("narrative comprehension") have been shown to be different for autistic individuals, regardless of whether stories are told through written or spoken language ("verbal narratives") or through pictures ("visual narratives"). Narrative comprehension across modalities requires understanding both meaning (semantics) and narrative grammar (structure). While it is well established that autistic individuals sometimes show lower performance on semantic processing tasks compared to nonautistic individuals, it is less clear whether and how differences in structural processing contribute to narrative comprehension. This study used electroencephalography to examine structural processing abilities during visual narrative comprehension in autistic and nonautistic adults. We observed differences in structural processing suggesting that autistic individuals may use different cognitive mechanisms for processing narrative grammar. These novel results suggest a potential contributor to narrative comprehension differences in autism.
A common assumption in the literature is that metaphors make abstract concepts more concrete. This article empirically tests this assumption in a large corpus of (metaphorical) domain constructions published between 2000 and 2019 in American English (N = 72,703). Results demonstrate that metaphorical domain constructions are indeed more concrete than nonmetaphorical domain constructions. Furthermore, for metaphorical (but not for nonmetaphorical) domain constructions, concreteness was unrelated to conventionality. Metaphorical (vs. nonmetaphorical) domain constructions were also more concrete for humanities, social science, and general topics but not for science topics. Finally, metaphorical domain constructions from the source domains of landscape, building, natural phenomenon, and game were more concrete than those from other domains. By contrast, metaphorical domain constructions from the domains of economy and living being were less concrete than those from other domains. Metaphorical domain constructions from the domains of war, machine, and travel did not differ in concreteness from those from other domains. Implications for metaphor theory are discussed.
This study investigated cognitive processing biases (e.g. preferences for local vs. global coherence) in inferential reasoning among 130 adolescents (of which 18 were diagnosed as autistic) when spontaneously processing narrative stories. Students were randomly assigned to either the text-only condition or a multimodal comics condition (text + image), where narratives were word-for-word the same in both conditions. After students read each story in either modality, they responded to the same set of four open-ended questions that measured their dispositional inference, instantiated as Integrative-Inferential Reasoning. Specifically, interaction among the autistic diagnosis status, modality, and comics experience was explored. Analyses using the Item Response Theory models showed that among those assigned to the comics modality, greater self-reported comics experience was associated with higher levels of integration (i.e. Integrative-Inferential Reasoning), and this comic-experience effect was significantly larger for the autistic students, who tended to have less self-reported comics experience and a strong preference for local, text-based inference. In contrast, among those with the highest level of comics experience, there was no significant difference between them and their nonautistic peers. We illustrate how the three-way interactions can be effectively visualized on the common Item Response Theory scale and discuss implications for theories and practices regarding narrative discourse processing, particularly for understanding Autistic cognition.
To understand how people read, one needs to gain insight into the processes by which they engage with a text and by which they construct meaning. This paper discusses the use of Think-aloud methodologies to investigate such processes as well as differences in processes between and within individuals. Think-aloud methods have considerable potential as they may reveal the actual contents of reading processes but also pose methodological and interpretational challenges. I discuss such potential and challenges, and reflect on considerations for methodological choices that optimize potential and mitigate challenges. I illustrate these issues by reviewing empirical studies on three dimensions of inter- and intra-individual differences in reading behavior (reading skill, processing profile, and reading goals/standards of coherence). The purpose is to give researchers food for thought on how Think-aloud methods can be used best to investigate (differences in) reading behavior and how to make informed choices about the design of their Think-aloud studies.
People's investments in stories and preferences for how narratives should unfold are important aspects of their comprehension activities. Previous work has indeed indicated that reader preferences influence narrative experiences. The current project interrogated this influence, with attention to whether positive and negative preferential investments exert differential effects on comprehension and memory. In two experiments, participants read stories that encouraged preferences for event successes or failures, ending with outcomes consistent, inconsistent, or neutral with respect to those preferences. Participants exhibited difficulty reading stories that encouraged failure as compared to success preferences, but once failure preferences were encoded, they showed difficulty assimilating outcomes inconsistent with them. Participants also had difficulty recognizing outcomes from these stories 2 days later. The results support accounts that foreground negative preferences as non-normative and help to identify when and why differential effects of success and failure preferences might be obtained. They also highlight the need to integrate participatory responses like preferences into contemporary models and accounts of text processing.
Successful communication is not only about understanding what interlocutors say but also how they say it. It has been well established that speakers in a variety of languages utilize prosodic prominence (e.g., higher pitch, longer duration, and stronger intensity) to highlight important information, and listeners can effectively use these cues to achieve successful comprehension. Although increasing evidence on the role of prosody in language processing has been found in nontonal languages (e.g., Germanic languages) in recent years, less is known about tonal languages, despite differences in the phonetic implementation of prosodic focus between languages, such as pitch accenting in English versus pitch range expansion in Mandarin. To address this gap, the present study examines whether and how prosodic prominence influences memory for focused information and its contextual alternatives in Mandarin, using a delayed recall task with 64 participants. The results indicate that in Mandarin, prosodic prominence significantly facilitated the recall of focused words but had limited effects on the recall of focus alternatives. This study sheds light on how Mandarin listeners use prosodic cues to facilitate their native language comprehension and expands our knowledge of the role of prosody in tonal languages in general.
Today, people face the prevalent issue of exposure to misinformation. The internet allows for quick access to information; however, information is not always verified for accuracy. Readers can unknowingly read and retain misinformation; it is imperative that readers can apply appropriate strategies for avoiding or overcoming misinformation. We contrasted processing patterns in six adults' think-aloud protocols to examine what types of strategies were associated with protecting oneself against acquiring misinformation about childhood vaccinations and problematic strategies associated with acquiring misinformation. The results suggested that participants who did not acquire misinformation engaged in more self-explanation to challenge the misinformation they encountered. In contrast, those who acquired misinformation did not discount the misinformation and engaged more closely with the texts (e.g. paraphrasing what was read). The patterns in this study indicate the importance of "deeper" and more evaluative meaning-making activities when one is exposed to misinformation to combat its problematic consequences for understanding and decision-making.
