Much of the recent research on discourse comprehension has centered on the readers’ ability to construct coherent mental representations of texts. In order to form a unifi ed representation of a given text, a reader must be able to join the information presented in the text with his/her background knowledge to construe the meaning that may not be explicitly stated, through the generation of inf...

Blanco & Moldovan (Blanco and Moldovan, 2011) have empirically demonstrated that negated sentences often convey implicit positive inferences, or focus, and that these inferences are both human annotatable and machine learnable. Concentrating on their annotation process, this paper argues that the focusbased implicit positivity should be separated from concepts of scalar implicature and negraisi...

The analysis of natural-language text involves many different kinds of processes that might be described in multiple ways. One way to describe these processes is in terms of the semantics of their requirements and results. Such a description makes it possible to view these processes as analogous to inference rules in a theorem-proving system. This analogy is useful for metacognition because the...

Theoretical Background This study takes part in a series of studies that analyze bridging inferences within expository films. According to Graesser, León and Otero (2002) bridging inferences establish coherence which is necessary to establish a coherent mental model. In other words: If a coherence break (CB) occurs the reader needs to solve the CB by generating a bridging inference in order to ...

Interpreting causal relations plays an important role in everyday life, for example in scientific inquiries and text comprehension. Errors in causal reasoning can be a recipe for disaster. Despite vast literature on the psychology of human causal reasoning, there are few investigations into preferred inferences in relational three-term problems. Based on a previous formal investigation about re...

The goal of this study was to examine how individual variation in readers' skills and, in particular, their background knowledge about a text are related to text memory. Recollection and familiarity estimates were obtained from remember and know judgments to text ideas. Recollection estimates to old items were predicted by readers' background knowledge, but not by other comprehension-related fa...

People can acquire both true and false knowledge about the world from fictional stories. The present study explored whether the benefits and costs of learning about the world from fictional stories extend beyond memory for directly stated pieces of information. Of interest was whether readers would use correct and incorrect story references to make deductive inferences about related information...

This paper presents a possible solution for the text inference problem extracting information unstated in a text, but implied. The inference algorithm consists of a set of highly parallel search methods that when applied to the knowledge base find contexts of sentences that reveal information relevant to the text. Implementation, results and parallelism analysis are discussed. 1 Statement of th...

We examined whether timeline icons improved older and younger adults' comprehension of medication information. In Experiment 1, comprehension of instructions with the icon (icon/text format) and without the icon (text-only format) was assessed by questions about information that was (a) implicit in the text but depicted explicitly by the icon (total dose in a 24 hour period), (b) stated and dep...