An Experimental Study Of Elaborative Inference Generation In Text Comprehension

Elaborative inferences, which could add to the richness of a reader' s understanding of the passage, have received considerable attention in text comprehension research. And they include broad inference and stricted inference. The current researches on elaborative inferences mainly involve the experimental materials and methodological differences between studies, while age and instruction effects have seldom been investigated.The two experiments were performed to investigate age and instruction effects on elaborative inferences. Experiment 1 used 2 X3 design to explore instruction effect; Experiment 2, which was laid great stress on, took 4X3 design to investigate the age effect of elaborative inference generation. The results are demonstrated as following:(1)The instruction that contains the sentence "Do the sentences accord with the previous passage?" is more suitable for studies of elaborative inferences;(2)When long exposition texts are employed as experiment materials, readers who are above 10 years old can generate broad inference online; however, there are significant differences between age groups on the response time they spend in verifying target sentences;(3)Though stricted inference is hardly generated online, the older the readers are, the less response time they spend in generating this type of elaborative inferences.