This study explored the relation between general knowledge and the hemispheric processing of metaphoric expressions in college age students. We hypothesized that prior knowledge influences how the hemispheres process metaphors in these individuals. In this study, 97 young (college-aged) adults completed a general knowledge and vocabulary test, and were then divided into high-knowledge/high-vocabulary and low-knowledge/low-vocabulary groups. Next, participants viewed word pairs consisting of conventional metaphors, novel metaphors, word pairs with a literal meaning, and unrelated word pairs. The first word in each pair was presented centrally, and the second was presented to the right visual field-left hemisphere (rvf-LH) or the left visual field-right hemisphere (lvf-RH), and participants indicated whether each pair was a meaningful expression. Accuracy results showed an interaction between general knowledge and visual-field hemisphere. Low-knowledge participants were more accurate for metaphors presented to the rvf-LH than the lvf-RH, whereas high-knowledge participants showed no accuracy differences between the hemispheres. We also found an interaction between vocabulary and visual field-hemisphere for conventional metaphors. Specifically, low-vocabulary participants showed a left-hemisphere accuracy advantage, but high-vocabulary participants showed similar accuracy patterns in both hemispheres. These results suggest that young adult readers who have more general knowledge process conventional metaphors similarly in both hemispheres, whereas young adult readers who have less general knowledge may rely more heavily on left-hemisphere processes during conventional metaphor comprehension.

Learning and problem solving in the natural sciences and history is affected by epistemic cognition. Likewise, it has recently been proposed that the same is true for interpreting literature, although there is little empirical research on how individual differences in epistemic cognition for literary reading impact literary interpretation (Lee, Goldman, Levine, & Magliano, 2016). The development of a valid and reliable assessment of epistemic cognition for literature is an important step in examining this question. The present study takes a first study toward such a scale in that it reports the development of a scale that for assessing adolescents' epistemic cognitions for literary reading, the Literature Epistemic Cognition Scale (LECS). Results address the content validity, factorial validity, criterion validity, and reliability of the three constructs assessed on the LECS: relevance of literature to understand people and the human experience; openness of literary works to multiple meanings and interpretations; functionality of multiple readings of literary works for interpretation. The study involved a large sample of middle school students in the U.S. Confirmatory factor analysis validated the three-factor structure of the LECS. Criterion validity was established via correlational analyses between the subscale of the LECS and measures of the speed of acquiring knowledge, liking of reading, and frequency of reading as assessed through additional surveys. The implications of the results and directions for potential future research are discussed.

Recent findings suggest that the right hemisphere plays a key role when readers comprehend figurative language. However, it is currently unclear how specific types of figurative language, such as idioms (e.g., "to bury the hatchet"), are processed in the right and left cerebral hemispheres. Prior research suggests that a reader's previous exposure to an idiomatic phrase (i.e., the level of familiarity) and the plausibility of an idiom (i.e., the level of ambiguity) influence how idioms are processed. To investigate how familiarity influences the hemispheric processing of idioms (Experiment 1), participants read texts containing familiar or less familiar idioms and made lexical decisions to related target words presented to the left visual field-right hemisphere or to the right visual field-left hemisphere. To investigate how ambiguity influences the hemispheric processing of idioms (Experiment 2), participants read texts containing high or low ambiguity idioms and completed a lexical decision task to related target words presented to each visual field-hemisphere. For both familiar and less familiar idioms, greater facilitation was evident in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere. Additionally, greater facilitation was evident in the left hemisphere for low ambiguity idioms than for high ambiguity idioms, and greater facilitation was evident in the right hemisphere for high ambiguity idioms than for low ambiguity idioms. These findings suggest that the right hemisphere has an advantage when readers process ambiguous idioms, whereas the left hemisphere has an advantage when readers process low ambiguity idioms, and both familiar and less familiar idioms.

To successfully understand a text, readers often mentally represent the shape of an object described in a text (e.g., creating a mental image of a sliced tomato when reading about a tomato on a pizza). However, it is currently unclear how the cerebral hemispheres contribute to these mental images during reading. In the current study, participants were presented with sentences consistent with the shape of an object (i.e., the match condition), sentences inconsistent with the shape of an object (i.e., the mismatch condition), or sentences that did not specify the shape of an object (i.e., the neutral condition). Participants read each sentence and then viewed an image of an object that was quickly presented to either the right visual field-left hemisphere (rvf-LH) or the left visual field-right hemisphere (lvf-RH). Results indicate that when the shape of an object was implicitly described in the text (in Experiment 1), response times for images presented to the rvf-LH were longer in the mismatch condition than in the neutral or match conditions. However, no response time differences were evident in the lvf-RH. When the shape of an object was explicitly described in the text (in Experiment 2), response times were longer in the mismatch condition than in the neutral and match conditions in both hemispheres. Thus, hemispheric involvement in mental representation depends on how explicit information is described in a text. Furthermore, these findings suggest that readers inhibit information that does not match an object׳s shape described in a text.

This study compared the nature of text comprehension as measured by multiple-choice format and open-ended format questions. Participants read a short text while explaining preselected sentences. After reading the text, participants answered open-ended and multiple-choice versions of the same questions based on their memory of the text content. The results indicated that performance on open-ended questions was correlated with the quality of self-explanations, but performance on multiple-choice questions was correlated with the level of prior knowledge related to the text. These results suggest that open-ended and multiple-choice format questions measure different aspects of comprehension processes. The results are discussed in terms of dual process theories of text comprehension.

Recent evidence suggests that certain types of figurative language, such as conventional metaphors or idioms, may have a left hemisphere processing advantage or are processed similarly in both hemispheres. Sarcasm, however, is likely processed differently than other types of figurative language in the hemispheres because readers often need to construct a novel interpretation of sarcastic text to successfully understand the text’s sarcastic meaning. To investigate how the hemispheres process sarcasm during text comprehension, participants in the current study read sarcastic, literal, and neutral texts and made lexical decisions to related target words presented to either the left visual field-right hemisphere or the right visual field-left hemisphere. Facilitation for sarcastic texts was greater in the right hemisphere than the left hemisphere. In addition, facilitation was greater for literal texts than sarcastic texts in the left hemisphere. These findings suggest that the right hemisphere may play a unique role when readers encounter sarcasm during text comprehension.

This study examined how the contribution of self-explanation to science text comprehension is affected by the cohesion of a text at a local level. Psychology undergraduates read and self-explained a science text with either low or high local cohesion. Local cohesion was manipulated by the presence or absence of connectives and referential words or phrases that explicitly link successive sentences. After the self-explanation activity, participants answered open-ended comprehension questions about the text. Participants in the high local cohesion condition produced higher quality explanations, including more local bridging self-explanations, than those in the low local cohesion condition. However, these explanations, although higher in quality, did not improve comprehension. Performance on text-based comprehension questions was better in the low local cohesion condition. In addition, the correlation between self-explanation quality and comprehension performance was generally higher in the low local cohesion condition compared to the high local cohesion condition, even after factoring out participants' level of topic-relevant knowledge. These data suggest that the contribution of self-explanation to comprehension is larger when the text lacks certain cues that facilitate making connections between successive ideas in a text. Further, the results imply that a key contribution of self-explanation to text comprehension is to induce active inference processes whereby readers fill in conceptual gaps in challenging texts.

Genre recognition is a critical facet of text comprehension and text classification. In three experiments, we assessed the minimum number of words in a sentence needed for genre recognition to occur, the distribution of genres across text, and the relationship between reading ability and genre recognition. We also propose and demonstrate a computational model for genre recognition. Using corpora of narrative, history, and science sentences, we found that readers could recognize the genre of over 80% of the sentences and that recognition generally occurred within the first three words of sentences; in fact, 51% of the sentences could be correctly identified by the first word alone. We also report findings that many texts are heterogeneous in terms of genre. That is, around 20% of text appears to include sentences from other genres. In addition, our computational models fit closely the judgments of human result. This study offers a novel approach to genre identification at the sub-sentential level and has important implications for fields as diverse as reading comprehension and computational text classification.

Individual Differences and the Impact of Forward and Backward Causal Relations on the Online Processing of Narratives Stephen W. Briner (sbriner@mail.psyc.memphis.edu) Christopher A. Kurby (ckurby@mail.psyc.memphis.edu) Danielle S. McNamara (d.mcnamara@mail.psyc.memphis.edu) Department of Psychology University of Memphis Memphis, TN 38152 Abstract This paper investigated the impact of causality on reading time by examining the contributions of forward antecedent and backward consequence connections. Undergraduate students read four narrative texts, sentence by sentence. Reading times for each sentence were regressed onto the number of antecedents connecting forward to a sentence and backward to prior sentences. Overall, forward antecedents and backward consequences explained unique variance in reading times, with increases in antecedents and consequences predicting decreases in reading time. However, causal consequences did not contribute unique variance to participants with higher literature knowledge. Further, the presence of forward antecedents significantly attenuated reading time differences in reading skill, and lower knowledge participants read sentences significantly faster than higher knowledge participants when forward antecedents were present. These results suggest that readers track both forward causal antecedents and backward causal consequences in online comprehension. Keywords: reading comprehension; reading time; narrative; individual differences; causal relations; causal relatedness; situation model; causality. Introduction According to the event-indexing model, readers track at least five situational dimensions during language comprehension (i.e., causality, temporality, spatiality, protagonist goals, and intentionality; Zwaan, Langston, & Graesser, 1995). Based on these dimensions, readers create a mental model (i.e., situation model) of the events described in the text. As comprehension unfolds, readers track the continuity of each dimension. When a discontinuity is encountered, readers must update their situation model to account for this shift (Zwaan et al., 1995). The tracking of these dimensions contributes to maintaining a coherent situation model of the events. Central to the maintenance of coherence is the extent to which an event or action is causally related to previous events or goals (Graesser, Singer, & Trabasso, 1994; Zwaan et al., 1995). Causal relatedness, as described by Trabasso and Sperry (1985), refers to the internal structure of a particular text’s causes and effects. In a narrative text, for example, character desires may cause the character to commit certain actions. These actions may in turn result in a change in the character’s motivation or reactions from other characters. However, not every event in a text is clear-cut. Sometimes events or states in a text flesh out the background of the narrative without those states having explicit causes or effects. Or, the events in a text may have little apparent causal structure. For example, the narrative structure of William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959) deliberately obscures the causal relations in the story by re- arranging the sequence of events, seemingly at random. The seminal paper by Trabasso and Sperry (1985) argued that certain items in a text should be more important to the story than others based on their causal relations within the text. They proposed that conceptual dependencies, or the number of concepts that rely on a particular event in the text, are a major factor in determining the importance of a given item to the text as a whole. In this framework, Item A in a text is conceptually dependent on Item B if the events in Item B psychologically motivates, physically causes, or otherwise enables the events in Item A. Trabasso and Sperry (1985) found that the number of causal connections between particular clauses accounted for a significant amount of the variance in judgments of importance. Trabasso and van den Broek (1985) found that causal connectivity also influences the memory representation for text. They found that more causal connections between particular clauses led to improved recall. Zwaan, Graesser, and Magliano (1995) demonstrated that causal connections have an impact on reading time. In their experiment, they collected sentence-by-sentence reading times of narrative texts. The results indicated that reading times slowed when encountering a sentence on new causal chain. Thus, reading time increases (i.e., slows down) when a causal relationship is difficult to infer from the text. Further evidence for the importance of causal relatedness on reading time comes from Wolfe, Magliano, and Larsen (2005), in which participants read two-sentence stories. The second sentence of each story was either causally related or unrelated to the first sentence. Sentences with a high degree of causal relation to each other were read more quickly than sentences with a low degree of causal relation. These results suggest that causal relatedness has an impact on ease of processing; the easier the causal relations are to infer, the more quickly a reader will process the sentences. Others, such as Myers, Shinjo, and Duffy (1987), have reported similar findings.