Psychological Mechanism Of The Young People Of Working Memory Capacity And The Expected Reasoning

Reading is a kind of complicated process, through which people can acquire knowledge and information. Predictive inferences(PI) have received considerable attention in reading research .But there were a lot of differences about the mechanism of PI and whether PI can generate on-line, and most of research only focused on college students and seldom referred to middle school students.By using DMDX procedure and ASL 504 model eye-tracker system, mechanism of PI was discussed and the role of age and working memory was explored. The experimental design is 3(grade two in middle school, grade two in high school, grade two in college) X 2(working memory: high or low) X 2(context: predicting or control) X 2(target: inferential or non-predictable).A naming task was used to evaluate the activation level of inference concept during reading The interval between the onset of the context and the onset of the target word (SOA) varied between 500ms and 1500ms in experiment 1, 2 and 3. In experiment 4,the first-fixation time, the gaze duration, the second-pass time and the right-bounded time were analyzed. The results showed that:(l)The time of elder people spent in PI was shorter than younger people.(2)PI can generate during reading with some delay not immediately.(3)The mechanism of PI supported constructionisttheory.(4)High working memory capacity can shorten the time course of PI.