The Effect Of Verbal Updating Ability And Bridging Event On Bridging Inferential Processing During Visual Narrative Comprehension

Since the 1970s,inferential processing has been the research focus of linguistics,psychology,as well as education.It is widely acknowledged that inferential processing is crucial for reading comprehension.Recently,evidence from diverse modalities(e.g.visual narrative)suggests a general inference skill during comprehension.Many factors were found to influence inference generation in discourse,including working memory.However,little is known for the factors that have an impact on inferential processing in visual narrative.In view of this,this study utlizes wordless comic-type visual narratives to investigate the factor that influences inferential processing in visual narrative.Specifically,this study aims to explore whether verbal updating ability has effects on bridging inference processing and to verify whether an action star panel elicits bridging inferences with both the viewing time method and a memory recognition task.A total of sixty-three native Chinese-speaking university students who are not familiar with the comic Complete Peanuts participated in the study,each of which conducted four experimental tasks In order to assess participants’ verbal updating ability,the first task is a letter memory task.According to performance on this task,participants were later identified into high or low verbal updating ability group.At the second task,participants were required to view twenty visual sequences selected and adapted from Complete Peanuts.For each sequence,there is a beginning state,a bridging event(depicted scene or action star)and an end state.Later,a distraction task lasted for five minutes.At last,participants conducted a recognition task in which they were asked to distinguish both previously seen and unseen bridging event panel.The results show that:1)verbal updating ability do not have an effect on bridging inference generation in visual narratives;2)a convergence was found between the viewing time for end-state panels,sensitivity(A’)and FAs,indicating action star elicits participants’ bridging inference generation;3)verbal updating ability is positively related to Hits but negatively related to Bias(B”).Together,these results support the general inference skill through verifying the generation of bridging inferences at a certain type of suppletive panel as well as add value to the comprehension of static sequential images by exploring how verbal updating ability relate to bridging inference processing in visual narrative.The results of this study may offer insights to inference assessment and intervention,thus contributing to reading comprehension.