An Eye Movement Study Of Situation-Based Predictive Inference In Discourse Comprehension

The field of discourse processing has grown tremendously during the past two decades .The currency of psychology rises to the extent that discourse psychologist can improve reading ,text design,complex learning,and social interaction .The focus of this article is on the situation-based predictive inferences,which is an important process during reading.It included three experiments thirty individuals were recruited for each experiment,and fifteen a group.According to whether predictive inferences are generated on-line,the experimental materials were divided into two categories:the high -support context condition ,the low-support context condition.The Experiment 1 is to explore whether predictive inferences are generated on-line by comparing the reading time for the target sentence in two conditions.Experiment 2 is to further study predictive inferences by adding the text distance between the context and theinference-evoking point in high-support context condition.Experiment 3 is to study when inference-evoking sentence is activated in different level ,predictive inferences whether will be instantiated into the long-term memory representation of a text.The results were demonstrated as following:1.The predictive inference can be generated on-line.2.The predictive inference can be generated and the high-support context can store in long-term memory ,no matter how long the text distance between the context and the inference-evoking point,3.The predictive inference can store in long-term memory and the long-term memory representation of a text may be altered by the activation of a predictive inference,...