Inferential revision in narrative texts: An ERP study

Abstract

We evaluated the process of inferential revision during text comprehension in adults. Participants with high or low working memory read short texts, in which the introduction supported two plausible concepts (e.g., 'guitar/ violin'), although one was more probable ('guitar'). There were three possible continuations: a neutral sentence, which did not refer back to either concept; a no-revise sentence, which referred to a general property consistent with either concept (e.g., '…beautiful curved body'); and a revise sentence, which referred to a property that was consistent with only the less likely concept (e.g., '…matching bow'). Readers took longer to read the sentence in the revise condition, indicating that they were able to evaluate their comprehension and detect a mismatch. In a final sentence, a target noun referred to the alternative concept supported in the revise condition (e.g., 'violin'). ERPs indicated that both working memory groups were able to evaluate their comprehension of the text (P3a), but only high working memory readers were able to revise their initial incorrect interpretation (P3b) and integrate the new information (N400) when reading the revise sentence. Low working memory readers had difficulties inhibiting the no-longer-relevant interpretation and thus failed to revise their situation model, and they experienced problems integrating semantically related information into an accurate memory representation.Keywords Revising information . Inference making . Working memory . P3a . P3b . N400Successful text comprehenders construct an integrated, coherent, and accurate mental representation of the state of affairs described by the text. The construction of this situation model requires the reader to go beyond a representation of the surface characteristics of the text by generating inferences and incorporating world knowledge from long-term memory (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978). The construction of the situation model is a dynamic process (e.g., Kintsch, 1998;McNamara & Magliano, 2009;Rapp & van den Broek, 2005); the text is processed incrementally (e.g., word by word and sentence by sentence) and, therefore, the situation model is constantly being updated as the text unfolds. As each new piece of information is processed, it must be integrated with the mental representation constructed so far. This involves monitoring for comprehension to identify when and where additional processing, such as inference generation, is necessary to ensure coherence (Kintsch, 1998;Perfetti, Stafura, & Adlof, 2013).Comprehension monitoring is the metacognitive awareness that readers have about what they are reading (Wagoner, 1983). Baker (1985) distinguished two monitoring phases: evaluation and regulation. Evaluation, more recently defined as validation (Singer, 2013), refers to the process that allows readers to detect an inconsistency or mismatch in the text (e.g., Vauras, Kinnunen, Salonen, & Lehtinen, 2008). Current evidence on this process in adult readers converges on the view that evaluation is a rou...

The nature of first and second language processing: The role of cognitive control and L2 proficiency during text-level comprehension

“…These effects signaled greater ease of integration in the expected condition, demonstrating that, in their L1, comprehenders were able to revise their initial prediction when previous alternative inferential information had been provided. Importantly, this result also replicates the findings of the original study in L1 comprehension (Pérez et al, 2015), where higher WM readers showed less negativity in the expected compared to the other two conditions. In the L2, by contrast, the expected condition was only marginally less negative than the unexpected, and no differences were found between the uncertain and the other two conditions.…”

“…A paradigm developed to investigate inferential revision is the situation model revision task (Pérez et al, 2015). In this task, participants are presented with short narrative texts (see Table 1).…”

Evaluation and revision of inferential comprehension in narrative texts: an eye movement study

“…Therefore, our second goal was to assess whether individual differences in EVALUATION AND REVISION OF INFERENCES 6 working memory associated with the revision process are related to working memory differences. Given previous work, we anticipated a closer association with verbal working memory (Cain, 2006;Pérez et al, 2015;Pimperton & Nation, 2010).…”

“…These studies have usually used a sentence-by-sentence procedure, measuring reading times for the whole sentence and/or answers to comprehension questions (e.g., Albrecht & O'Brien, 1993;Rapp & Kendeou, 2007;O'Brien et al, 1998;Zwaan & Madden, 2004). A recent study by Pérez, Cain, Castellanos and Bajo (2015) measured on-line processing in evaluation and revision by recording event-related potentials, but they did so only for a final disambiguating sentence, without providing the opportunity to reread the text after encountering the mismatch or before answering the comprehension sentence. To capture the interplay between mismatch EVALUATION AND REVISION OF INFERENCES 5 detection (evaluation) and mismatch regulation (revision) in the construction of the situation model, it is important to measure reading as it happens, across the whole text (not just an isolated sentence) together with the comprehension sentence.…”

“…Working memory differences in reading comprehension are more closely associated with verbal than nonverbal working memory (Carretti, Borella, Cornoldi, & De Beni, 2009;Nation, Adams, Bowyer-Crane, & Snowling, 1999;Pimperton & Nation, 2010;Seigneuric, Ehrlich, Oakhill, & Yuill, 2000), and working memory capacity has also been related to higher-level aspects of reading comprehension such as inference making (e.g., George, Mannes, & Hoffman, 1997;Virtue, van den Broek, & Linderholm, 2006) and comprehension monitoring (e.g., Daneman & Carpenter, 1983;Schommer & Surber, 1986). Indeed, Pérez et al (2015) found a relationship between the revision process and individual differences in working memory, which they explained by suggesting that low working memory readers have more difficulty inhibiting an initial incorrect interpretation. Then, although the revision process seems to depend on working memory capacity, it is unclear whether this relationship depends on a domain-specific mechanism.…”