A Study Of Inferential Processes In Discourse Comprehension

In recent years, the study of inferences at discourse level has received more attention. Inference is any piece of information that is not explicitly stated in a text but being activated, or it is a process of generating new semantic information from given semantic information of discourse. During reading, inference combines with the knowledge of acquisition stored in our brain with textual information, and thus puts separate utterances together, making a coherent mental representation. And the important function of inferential process is not only establishing the relationships of different parts but also retrieving the world knowledge from our long-term memory to integrate the content of discourse.The research in this thesis is designed to investigate two questions: the differences of inferential processes in discourse comprehension between skilled comprehenders and less-skilled comprehenders and the relation between different reading comprehension abilities and the inferences of the discourse comprehension. Here, two types of inferences are assessed: coherence inferences, which are essential for adequate comprehension of the text, and elaborative inferences, which enhance the text representation but which are not crucial to understanding. The subjects are the 40 undergraduate students coming from JiLin University. 20 skilled comprehenders, who are the junior English majors and have got higher scores (from 70 to 80) in the TEM-4, and 20 less-skilled comprehenders, who are the sophomore (non-English majors) and have just passed 60 in the CET-4. There are four reading comprehension passages in the experiment. The design of the questions involves with different inferential processes.The results reveal that: 1) Skilled comprehenders generated more correct coherence inferences and at the same time they have spare capacity which facilitates the on-line computation of elaborative inferences that are not essential to coherence, whereas less-skilled comprehenders pay much attention to the coherence inferences because of the limitation of their processing capacity; 2) there exists a relationship between the level of reading proficiency and the inferences of discourse comprehension. The higher the reading proficiency of the readers, the more correct inferences they make.Based on the findings, some tentative suggestions are proposed on where we should put the focus of inference in discourse comprehension. 1) Skilled comprehenders have already mastered the coherence inferences, but it is easy for them to neglect the delicacy of the function of elaborative inferences. 2) Less-skilled comprehenders should pay much attention to the coherence inferences which are crucial to the understanding of the text. Because they still have trouble in finding distant antecedent or global causes so that they can not establish a coherent representation of what the text is about.Due to the author's limited knowledge, lack of teaching experience and the limitation of the research itself, there is still much room for the future research of inferential processes in discourse comprehension.