UNDERSTANDING TEXT - ACHIEVING EXPLANATORY COHERENCE THROUGH ONLINE INFERENCES AND MENTAL OPERATIONS IN WORKING-MEMORY

The question of whether global, causal inferences are made during comp rehension is studied following a three-pronged approach. First, potent ial inferences were first identified a priori in texts generated by th e causal network model for narrative discourse. Second, verbal protoco l data in the form of ''talking aloud'' during the reading of sentence s in stories were used to evaluate whether or not people made the pred icted inferences. The global, causal inferences occurred where anticip ated by the discourse analysis. The talk-aloud data also revealed that subjects used four main mental operations during comprehension of a t ext sentence: maintaining, retrieving, elaborating, and explaining. Th ird, the talk-aloud data predicted recognition priming of superordinat e goal statements, reading times of sentences, coherence ratings of st ories, and long-term retention of stories. The data are discussed with reference to constructivist versus minimalist processing claims, work ing-memory models, and what verbal protocols reveal about processing.