Spacing judgments as an index of integration from context-induced relational processing: Implications for the free recall of ambiguous prose passages

Stern, Leonard D.; Dahlgren, Richard G.; Gaffney, Linda L.

doi:10.3758/bf03197153

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 49 publications

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“…In Experiment 1, story titles were included to provide participants with some of the thematic richness that clearly is missing in four-sentence stories but that is present in most ordinary texts. Previous research has shown that titles can promote the integration of information and has yielded evidence both from memory tasks (e.g., Kozminsky, 1977; Stern, Dahlgren, & Gaffney, 1991) and from on-line measures (e.g., Garrod & Sanford, 1983; Smith & Swinney, 1992). Given the current evidence that elaborative inferences are made only under rather constrained circumstances (e.g., Murray et al, 1993; Potts et al, 1988) and particularly in situations when the inference is in focus at the time of test or is tagged as especially relevant by the experimenter, it is important to generalize the elaborative-inference results from Experiment 1 to texts in which the focusing influence of a title is absent.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

On-line evidence for elaborative logical inferences in text.

Lea¹

1995

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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A model of propositional-logic reasoning proposed by M. D. S. Braine, B. J. Reiser, and B. Rumain (1984) claims that inferences such as "p or q; not p/therefore q" are made spontaneously by readers at the moment both premises are available. This claim is inconsistent with some evidence in the text-processing literature that suggests that only those inferences necessary for textual coherence are made spontaneously. In the present study, participants read stories in which a logical inference was not necessary to maintain textual coherence, and inference making was assessed with on-line probes. Two experiments tested logical forms central to Braine et al.'s model, and both indicated that participants were making the logical inferences. Two further experiments replicated this result with stories that did not begin with thematic titles. These findings support Braine et al.'s prediction that some propositional-logic inferences are made routinely in texts that do not require them for coherence.

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