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Investigating Differences in General Comprehension Skill

DOI:10.1037//0278-7393.16.3.430
Authors:
Morton Ann Gernsbacher at University of Wisconsin–Madison
Morton Ann Gernsbacher
Kathleen R. Varner
Kathleen R. Varner
Kathleen R. Varner
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Mark Faust at University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Mark Faust
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For adults, skill at comprehending written language correlates highly with skill at comprehending spoken language. Does this general comprehension skill extend beyond language-based modalities? And if it does, what cognitive processes and mechanisms differentiate individuals who are more versus less proficient in general comprehension skill? In our first experiment, we found that skill in comprehending written and auditory stories correlates highly with skill in comprehending nonverbal, picture stories. This finding supports the hypothesis that general comprehension skill extends beyond language. We also found support for the hypotheses that poorer access to recently comprehended information marks less proficient general comprehension skill (Experiment 2) because less skilled comprehenders develop too many mental substructures during comprehension (Experiment 3), perhaps because they inefficiently suppress irrelevant information (Experiment 4). Thus, the cognitive processes and mechanisms involved in capturing and representing the structure of comprehensible information provide one source of individual differences in general comprehension skill.
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... (Gernsbacher & Faust, 1991;Gernsbacher & Robertson, 1995;Gernsbacher, Robertson, & Werner, 2001;Gernsbacher, Varner, & Faust, 1990;Khanna & Boland, 2010 (Gernsbacher & Faust, 1991;Gernsbacher & Robertson, 1995;Gernsbacher et al., 1990) (Betjemann & Keenan, 2008;Guldenoglu, Kargin, & Miller, 2012;Hahn, Hwang, & Ko, 2018;Joo, Hwang, & Choi, 2020;Nation & Snowling, 1999;Park, Hwang, & Ko, 2017 (Hwang, 2020;Ko, Choi, & Hwang, 2010;Ryu, Hwang, & Ko, 2018 (Gernsbacher et al., 1990;Grensbacher et al., 2001;Gernsbacher & Faust, 1991;Gernsbacher & Robertson, 1995;Ko et al., 2010;Ryu et al., 2018 ...
... (Gernsbacher & Faust, 1991;Gernsbacher & Robertson, 1995;Gernsbacher, Robertson, & Werner, 2001;Gernsbacher, Varner, & Faust, 1990;Khanna & Boland, 2010 (Gernsbacher & Faust, 1991;Gernsbacher & Robertson, 1995;Gernsbacher et al., 1990) (Betjemann & Keenan, 2008;Guldenoglu, Kargin, & Miller, 2012;Hahn, Hwang, & Ko, 2018;Joo, Hwang, & Choi, 2020;Nation & Snowling, 1999;Park, Hwang, & Ko, 2017 (Hwang, 2020;Ko, Choi, & Hwang, 2010;Ryu, Hwang, & Ko, 2018 (Gernsbacher et al., 1990;Grensbacher et al., 2001;Gernsbacher & Faust, 1991;Gernsbacher & Robertson, 1995;Ko et al., 2010;Ryu et al., 2018 ...
... (Gernsbacher & Faust, 1991;Gernsbacher & Robertson, 1995;Gernsbacher, Robertson, & Werner, 2001;Gernsbacher, Varner, & Faust, 1990;Khanna & Boland, 2010 (Gernsbacher & Faust, 1991;Gernsbacher & Robertson, 1995;Gernsbacher et al., 1990) (Betjemann & Keenan, 2008;Guldenoglu, Kargin, & Miller, 2012;Hahn, Hwang, & Ko, 2018;Joo, Hwang, & Choi, 2020;Nation & Snowling, 1999;Park, Hwang, & Ko, 2017 (Hwang, 2020;Ko, Choi, & Hwang, 2010;Ryu, Hwang, & Ko, 2018 (Gernsbacher et al., 1990;Grensbacher et al., 2001;Gernsbacher & Faust, 1991;Gernsbacher & Robertson, 1995;Ko et al., 2010;Ryu et al., 2018 ...
Characteristics of Semantic Processing in Children with Reading Difficulties through Grammaticality Judgment Task
Article
  • Dec 2022
Objectives: Previous studies have reported that children with poor reading show deficiencies in their ability to suppress unnecessary information during reading; however, most studies have used homonym tasks to prove this. Accordingly, we tried to look into the semantic processing characteristics of children with poor reading in sentence-level processing to expand the results of precedent studies away from the homonym task paradigm. Methods: 11 children with poor reading and 12 typical children in 3-6 grade participated. They conducted the grammaticality judgment task to judge whether there were any grammatical errors in the presented sentences. At that time, we recorded reaction accuracy and reaction time. The grammaticality judgment task was divided into the semantic-related condition and the semantic-unrelated condition according to the meaning connection intensity of two words in the sentences. Results: In response accuracy, both children with poor reading and typical children performed lower in the semantic-unrelated condition than in the semantic-related condition, but there were no significant differences in the performance of the two groups. In response time, children with poor reading overall took longer to judge grammaticality than typical children, and notably spent more time reacting in the semantic-unrelated condition than the semantic-related condition. Conclusion: Children with poor reading have difficulties suppressing unnecessarily active information compared to typical children. This tendency to allocate cognitive resources to unnecessary information when they read could ultimately be one of the factors that cause them to fail to comprehend reading.
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... ing the problems current coreference resolution systems seem to face, the results ultimately show that the blending of tools like PronounFlow and Stanford CoreNLP can considerably help the latter in the pronoun disambiguation process. On a second front, developing tools like PronounFlow might become the precedent prior to any coreference resolution systems to remove or mitigate barriers to comprehension skills or even to help coreference resolution systems and readers construct inferences based on easily available information (Corbett and Chang, 1983;Gernsbacher et al., 1990). As far as we can determine, tools like PronounFlow shed light on the potential of a new pronoun disambiguation era, where existing coreference resolution systems utilize them to lessen their drudge work. ...
PronounFlow: A Hybrid Approach for Calibrating Pronouns in Sentences
Preprint
  • Aug 2023
Flip through any book or listen to any song lyrics, and you will come across pronouns that, in certain cases, can hinder meaning comprehension, especially for machines. As the role of having cognitive machines becomes pervasive in our lives, numerous systems have been developed to resolve pronouns under various challenges. Commensurate with this, it is believed that having systems able to disambiguate pronouns in sentences will help towards the endowment of machines with commonsense and reasoning abilities like those found in humans. However, one problem these systems face with modern English is the lack of gender pronouns, where people try to alternate by using masculine, feminine, or plural to avoid the whole issue. Since humanity aims to the building of systems in the full-bodied sense we usually reserve for people, what happens when pronouns in written text, like plural or epicene ones, refer to unspecified entities whose gender is not necessarily known? Wouldn't that put extra barriers to existing coreference resolution systems? Towards answering those questions, through the implementation of a neural-symbolic system that utilizes the best of both worlds, we are employing PronounFlow, a system that reads any English sentence with pronouns and entities, identifies which of them are not tied to each other, and makes suggestions on which to use to avoid biases. Undertaken experiments show that PronounFlow not only alternates pronouns in sentences based on the collective human knowledge around us but also considerably helps coreference resolution systems with the pronoun disambiguation process.
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... Inference-making is not only relevant for comprehension of written text, but also for comprehension in non-reading contexts, such as films and audio-materials (e.g., Magliano et al., 2013;Tibus et al., 2013). Several researchers advocated that higher-level comprehension processes are modality-independent and therefore similar across different media (Gernsbacher et al., 1990;Kendeou et al., 2014). For example, the inferential Language Comprehension (iLC) framework states that language comprehension depends on a general inference skill that can transfer across different contexts and media (Kendeou et al., 2020). ...
Stimulating inference-making in second grade children when reading and listening to narrative texts
Article
Full-text available
Inference-making is a central element of successful reading comprehension, yet provides a challenge for beginning readers. Text decoding takes up cognitive resources which prevents beginning readers from successful inference-making and compromises reading comprehension. Listening does not require any decoding and could therefore offer a less demanding context to practice inference-making. The present study examined whether stimulating inference-making in a listening context is more effective and less cognitively demanding for beginning readers than a reading context. In three experiments, Dutch second grade children read two narratives and listened to two narratives. Inference-making was stimulated by asking them inferential questions during reading or listening and we compared this to a no-questioning control condition. After each narrative, we measured cognitive load and comprehension. It was expected that inferential questioning would increase cognitive load and negatively affect reading comprehension, but positively affect listening comprehension. The results indeed showed that inferential questioning increased cognitive load, but did not lead to differences in performance on open-ended comprehension questions (Experiment 1 & 2). When measuring comprehension with a free recall protocol (Experiment 3), we found a negative effect on total recall in both the reading and listening conditions. Taken together, we found no support for the hypothesized interaction. This raises questions about the effectiveness of inferential questioning for reading and listening comprehension of beginning readers, and whether listening is a good modality for improving inference-making.
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... This interference effect suggests that the participants activated the two meanings of the ambiguous word, which led to an interference effect when they performed the linguistic task. Therefore, according to studies on language control in monolinguals (Gernsbacher et al., 1990) and bilinguals (Green, 1998), participants would apply inhibition to resolve lexical competition by suppressing the contextually incorrect meaning of the ambiguous word. ...
The impact of bilingualism in within-language conflict resolution: an ERP study
Article
Full-text available
  • May 2023
We compared Spanish (L1)-English (L2) bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals in a semantic judgment relationship task in L1 that produced within-language conflict due to the coactivation of the two meanings of a Spanish homophone (e.g., "hola" and "ola" meaning "hello" and "a wave" in English). In this task, participants indicated if pairs of words were related or not ("agua-hola," "water-hello"). Conflict arose because a word ("agua," "water") not related to the orthographic form of a homophone ("hola," "hello") was related to the alternative orthographic form ("ola," "wave"). Compared to a control condition with unrelated word pairs ("peluche-hola," "teddy-hello"), the behavioral results revealed greater behavioral interference in monolinguals compared to bilinguals. In addition, electrophysiological results revealed N400 differences between monolinguals and bilinguals. These results are discussed around the impact of bilingualism on conflict resolution.
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... In conclusion, the results of this study suggest that the comprehension processes that support the construction of a task model and task awareness may be similar to those that support constructing mental models for texts (Britt et al., 2018). Constructing mental models likely relies on a common set of processes (Gernsbacher et al., 1990;Kintsch, 1998). Importantly, the results of the current study show that there are complex relationships between comprehension strategies, task awareness, and performance on an academic literacy task and illustrates the importance of understanding direct and mediational relationships, and that task awareness is an important factor to consider. ...
Relationships between task awareness, comprehension strategies, and literacy outcomes
Article
Full-text available
  • May 2023
Reading is typically guided by a task or goal (e.g., studying for a test, writing a paper). A reader's task awareness arises from their mental representation of the task and plays an important role in guiding reading processes, ultimately influencing comprehension outcomes and task success. As such, a better understanding of how task awareness arises and how it affects comprehension is needed. The present study tested the Task Awareness Mediation Hypothesis. This hypothesis assumes that the strategies that support reading comprehension (e.g., paraphrasing, bridging, and elaborative strategies) also support a reader's task awareness while engaged in a literacy task. Further, it assumes that the reader's level of task awareness partially mediates the relationship between these comprehension strategies and a comprehension outcome. At two different time points in a semester, college students completed an assessment of their propensity to engage in comprehension strategies and a complex academic literacy task that provided a measure of comprehension outcomes and an assessment of task awareness. Indirect effects analyses provided evidence for the Task Awareness Mediation Hypothesis showing that the propensity to engage in paraphrasing and elaboration was positively predictive of task awareness, and that task awareness mediated the relationships between these comprehension strategies and performance on the complex academic literacy task. These results indicate that task awareness has complex relationships with comprehension strategies and performance on academic literacy tasks and warrants further consideration as a possible malleable factor to improve student success.
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... Interestingly, Palmer, MacLeod, Hunt, & Davidson (1985) found that among adult readers, reading comprehension ability was indistinguishable from listening comprehension ability. In skilled and fluent readers, correlations among listening comprehension and reading comprehension are almost perfect (Gernsbacher, Varner, & Faust, 1990). According to Jeon & Yamashita (2014), investigations into the relationship between L2 listening and reading comprehension are scarce, contradictory and inconsistent. ...
Linguistic Factors Influencing L2 Reading Comprehension
Chapter
Full-text available
  • Dec 2022
Reading comprehension is a complex, multi-dimensional activity, which depends on a range of cognitive and linguistic processes. This article aims to provide a state-of-art review of linguistic factors which influence learners’ L2 reading comprehension. The focus is on variables which have been posited to be key determiners of L2 reading variance in previous narrative reviews: L2 grammar knowledge, L2 vocabulary knowledge, L2 listening comprehension and L2 decoding. This choice of variables was based on Jeon and Jamashita’s (2014) meta-analysis of 59 studies, in which they identified L2 grammar knowledge (r=.85), L2 vocabulary knowledge (r=.79), L2 listening comprehension (r=.77) and L2 decoding (r=.56) as the strongest correlates of L2 reading comprehension.
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... Our task requires study subjects to distinguish between "sequential" images presented from the same story/fable or "scrambled" images drawn from multiple fables. The manipulation of sequential vs. scrambled visual sequences has been employed in previous work to study the comprehension of visual narrative (Gernsbacher et al., 1990;Robertson, 2000;Cohn et al., 2012) and movie stimuli (Honey et al., 2012). We specifically examined if regional neural activity exhibits spectral features specific to processing of sequential vs. scrambled image patterns and whether interregional connectivity changes in response to scrambled or sequential images. ...
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Article
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The regional brain networks and the underlying neurophysiological mechanisms subserving the cognition of visual narrative in humans have largely been studied with non-invasive brain recording. In this study, we specifically investigated how regional and cross-regional cortical activities support visual narrative interpretation using intracranial stereotactic electroencephalograms recordings from thirteen human subjects (6 females, and 7 males). Widely distributed recording sites across the brain were sampled while subjects were explicitly instructed to observe images from fables presented in “sequential” order, and a set of images drawn from multiple fables presented in “scrambled” order. Broadband activity mainly within the frontal and temporal lobes were found to encode if a presented image is part of a visual narrative (sequential) or random image set (scrambled). Moreover, the temporal lobe exhibits strong activation in response to visual narratives while the frontal lobe is more engaged when contextually novel stimuli are presented. We also investigated the dynamics of interregional interactions between visual narratives and contextually novel series of images. Interestingly, the interregional connectivity is also altered between sequential and scrambled sequences. Together, these results suggest that both changes in regional neuronal activity and cross-regional interactions subserve visual narrative and contextual novelty processing.
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... Children with lower levels of inhibitory control are more likely to exhibit difficulties with following directions in classroom learning contexts and demonstrate higher levels of externalizing behaviors (Diamond, 2013), which may affect their academic success (Ursache et al., 2012). Readers with difficulties in inhibitory control have weaknesses in the efficiency of deactivating inappropriate or irrelevant semantic information while attending to essential information or relevant cues from the text (Henderson et al., 2013;Gernsbacher et al., 1990). ...
First-Grade Multilingual Students' Executive Function Profiles and Links to English Reading Achievement and Difficulties: A Person-Centered Latent Profile Analysis
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Although the important role of children’s executive function (EF) in their reading development has been well-established, less is known about the extent to which multilingual children’s EF components vary and whether the variability in different EF abilities explains multilingual children’s English reading achievement. The present study explored the U.S. first-grade multilingual children’s (N = 3,819) profiles of EF abilities and how the profile membership was associated with their English reading achievement, using a nationally representative sample of multilingual children from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010–11 (ECLS-K: 2011) study. We fit latent profile analysis with various EF components, including working memory, cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control, approaches to learning, and attentional focus, and found three distinct EF profiles in multilingual children: (a) Below-Average EFs with Above-Average Cognitive Flexibility (10.13%), (b) Above-Average EFs (84.09%), and (c) Very Low Cognitive Flexibility (5.78%). Controlling for kindergarten English reading achievement scores and demographic variables, children in the Above-Average EFs profile attained a significantly higher English reading achievement score than their peers, while children in the Very Low Cognitive Flexibility group had the lowest English reading achievement score. Our findings highlight the importance of understanding multilingual children’s heterogeneity in EF and has implications for the early identification of and tailored intervention for multilingual children at risk for reading difficulties.
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... Lexical-semantic ambiguity (for a review, see Rodd, 2018) challenges comprehension because of the competition between alternative meanings of a single word form during meaning access (Rayner & Duffy, 1986;Rodd, Gaskell, & Marslen-Wilson, 2002;Seidenberg, Tanenhaus, Leiman, & Bienkowski, 1982;Swinney, 1979), and because costly reinterpretation is sometimes required (Blott, Rodd, Ferreira, & Warren, 2021;Duffy, Morris, & Rayner, 1988;Rodd, Johnsrude, & Davis, 2010, 2012. Domain-general cognitive operations may be useful in responding to the challenge, as evidenced by the positive relationship between an individual's success in semantic ambiguity resolution and executive functioning skill (Gernsbacher & Faust, 1991;Gernsbacher, Varner, & Faust, 1990;Khanna & Boland, 2010) and dual task studies showing that performance on non-linguistic visual tasks is impaired during semantic reinterpretation (Rodd et al., 2010), but these domaingeneral operations may be plausibly generated by either language-selective or domaingeneral cortical regions. ...
Causal Contributions of the Domain-General (Multiple Demand) and the Language-Selective Brain Networks to Perceptual and Semantic Challenges in Speech Comprehension
Article
Full-text available
  • Sep 2022
Listening to spoken language engages domain-general Multiple Demand (MD, fronto-parietal) regions of the human brain, in addition to domain-selective (fronto-temporal) language regions, particularly when comprehension is challenging. However, there is limited evidence that the MD network makes a functional contribution to core aspects of understanding language. In a behavioural study of volunteers (n=19) with chronic brain lesions, but without aphasia, we assessed the causal role of these networks in perceiving, comprehending and adapting to spoken sentences made more challenging by acoustic-degradation or lexico-semantic ambiguity. We measured perception of and adaptation to acoustically-degraded (noise-vocoded) sentences with a word report task before and after training. Participants with greater damage to MD but not language regions required more vocoder channels to achieve 50% word report, indicating impaired perception. Perception improved following training, reflecting adaptation to acoustic degradation, but adaptation was unrelated to lesion location or extent. Comprehension of spoken sentences with semantically ambiguous words was measured with a sentence coherence judgement task. Accuracy was high and unaffected by lesion location or extent. Adaptation to semantic ambiguity was measured in a subsequent word association task, which showed that availability of lower-frequency meanings of ambiguous words increased following their comprehension (word-meaning priming). Word-meaning priming was reduced for participants with greater damage to language but not MD regions. Language and MD networks make dissociable contributions to challenging speech comprehension: using recent experience to update word meaning preferences depends on language-selective regions, whereas the domain-general MD network plays a causal role in reporting words from degraded speech.
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The cognitive and neural correlates of individual differences in inferential processes
Chapter
  • Apr 2015
Inferencing is defined as 'the act of deriving logical conclusions from premises known or assumed to be true', and it is one of the most important processes necessary for successful comprehension during reading. This volume features contributions by distinguished researchers in cognitive psychology, educational psychology, and neuroscience on topics central to our understanding of the inferential process during reading. The chapters cover aspects of inferencing that range from the fundamental bottom up processes that form the basis for an inference to occur, to the more strategic processes that transpire when a reader is engaged in literary understanding of a text. Basic activation mechanisms, word-level inferencing, methodological considerations, inference validation, causal inferencing, emotion, development of inferences processes as a skill, embodiment, contributions from neuroscience, and applications to naturalistic text are all covered as well as expository text, online learning materials, and literary immersion.
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Remembering left-right orientation of pictures.
Article
  • Jan 1987
Studied orientation retrieval and recognition memory for pictures in 32 undergraduate or graduate students. Results indicate an asymmetry in classifying test items as "same" vs "different" in left–right orientation. Identical copies of previously viewed items were classified more accurately than left–right reversals of those items. Response bias could not explain this asymmetry, and, moreover, correct "same" and "different" classifications were independently manipulable. Whereas repetition of input pictures (1 vs 2 presentations) affected primarily correct "same" classifications, retention interval (3 hrs vs 1 wk) affected primarily correct "different" classifications. Repetition but not retention interval affected judgments that previously seen pictures (both identical and reversed) were "old." Findings support a dual-process hypothesis that links "same" classifications to high familiarity, and "different" classifications to conscious sampling of images of previously viewed pictures. (27 ref)
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Individual differences in integrating information between and within sentences.
Article
  • Oct 1983
Cette etude examine les differences individuelles dans la maniere dont les lecteurs integrent des mots successifs dans leur representation d'un texte. Elle met l'accent sur le role du travail mnemonique et sur son interaction avec les caracteristiques du texte a lire, etudiee par l'introduction de contradictions dans les elements du texte
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Individual Differences in Cognition: A New Approach to Intelligence
Chapter
This chapter presents a collection of theoretical and empirical arguments against the separation of testing from a theory of cognition. It describes a general model of cognition and presents some of its implications for individual differences. The chapter presents a number of experiments, which relate the model to the present tests of intelligence and considers the implications of these results for both psychometrics and cognitive psychology, indicating some directions for future research. The theoretical model used is the Distributed Memory model, which is representative of a class of models acceptable to the majority of experimental psychologists interested in cognition. The theoretical approach underlying the distributed memory model is that the brain can be thought of as a computing system, and that as such it has a physical and implied logical construction which is called its system architecture. The physical structures comprising the system architecture are exercised by control processes analogous to programs in an actual computer.
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