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 ...

Students studied materials about the human heart and circulatory system using either (a) text only, (b) text with simple diagrams, or (c) text with detailed diagrams. During learning, students self-explained [1] the materials. Explanations were transcribed, separated into propositions, and analyzed according to the type of learning process they represented. Results demonstrated that diagrams pr...

In this event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, participants listened to and comprehended short stories implying or explicitly stating inference events. The aim of this study was to examine the neural mechanisms that underlie inference generation, a process essential to successful comprehension. We observed distinct patterns of increased fMRI signal for implied over ex...

In this event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, participants listened to and comprehended short stories implying or explicitly stating inference events. The aim of this study was to examine the neural mechanisms that underlie inference generation, a process essential to successful comprehension. We observed distinct patterns of increased fMRI signal for implied over ex...

Understanding a text requires two basic tasks: making inferences at several levels of knowledge and composing a global interpretation of the given text from those various types of inferences. Since making inferences at each level demands an extensive computations, there have been several attempts to use parallel inference mechanisms such as parallel marker passing (PMP) to increase the producti...