Text materials such as those introduced by McKoon and Ratcliff (1986) have been repeatedly used to shape a theoretical understanding of inference processes. Recent resultsofKeefeandMcDaniel (1993)with thesematerialswere intriguingwith respect to the generation and persistence of predictive and bridging inferences. To account for these data, the authors developed a formal model within Kintsch’s ...

PURPOSE Many children with communication disorders have reading comprehension difficulties, and in order to target interventions effectively it is important to identify which specific components of comprehension are especially challenging. The current study explored the relationship between text-inferencing skill, autistic symptomatology, and language phenotype. METHOD Typically developing ch...

The objective of the TACIT (Toward Annotating Commonsense Inferences in Text) project is to identify all or most of the commonsense inferences needed to understand a small collection of short narrative texts; to characterize those inferences in terms of features in different dimensions; and to characterize the commonsense knowledge that underlies those inferences. The primary purpose of this an...

The data of three experiments (Campion, in press) confirm that the readers of texts including conditional arguments process the conditional syntax as an asymmetric constraint which warrants the Modus Ponens, a logically valid inference. However, causal knowledge can raise doubt about that inference and warrant the validity of the reciprocal inference (Affirmation of the Consequent). Thus, accor...

The textual entailment problem is to determine if a given text entails a given hypothesis. This paper describes first a general generative probabilistic setting for textual entailment. We then focus on the sub-task of recognizing whether the lexical concepts present in the hypothesis are entailed from the text. This problem is recast as one of text cate-gorization in which the classes are the v...

Theoretical models of text processing, such as the construction-integration framework, pose fundamental questions about causal inference making that are not easily addressed by behavioral studies. In particular, a common result is that causal relatedness has a different effect on text reading times than on memory for the text: Whereas reading times increase linearly as causal relatedness decrea...

A model of propositional-logic reasoning proposed by M. D. S. Braine, B. J. Reiser, and B. Rumain (1984) claims that inferences such as "p or q; not p/therefore q" are made spontaneously by readers at the moment both premises are available. This claim is inconsistent with some evidence in the text-processing literature that suggests that only those inferences necessary for textual coherence are...