Text inferencing

Last updated

Text inferencing describes the tacit or active process of logical induction or deduction during reading. Inferences are used to bridge current text ideas with antecedent text ideas or ideas in the reader's store of prior world knowledge. Text inferencing is an area of study within the fields of cognitive psychology and linguistics. Much of the information extracted from text is not understood as or remembered from things stated directly in that text, but from abstractions, inferences, and higher order understandings of the text material. Thus, inferences help maintain a coherent discourse representation by organizing and making sense of otherwise seemingly disjointed text ideas [1]

Contents

Types of Inferences

Logical Inferences, Bridging (Backward) Inferences, and Elaborative (Forward) Inferences

Forward

Inferences made in text are generally said to be either "forward" or "backward" in relation to the current text idea. Forward inferences require the reader to bridge the current text idea to prior world knowledge, and are also referred to as "elaborative inferences." Consider the following sentence: [2] "The director and the cameraman were ready to shoot closeups when suddenly the actress fell from the 14th story." This type of inference is also referred to as a "predictive inference" because the reader is inferring something about events to come. The experimental evidence has suggested that upon reading sentences such as that one, readers activate concepts such as "dead", suggesting that they inferred the actress died. Such an inference almost seems necessary if full comprehension of the story is to occur. Other types of elaborative inferences are inferences regarding characters or instruments described in the text. Predictive inferences are not made as reliably and not last as long in memory as other types of inferences, [3] and are largely based on the amount of biasing context provided by nearby text ideas [4]

Backward

Backward inferences require the reader to bridge the current text idea to one that occurred earlier in the text. These types of inferences are also referred to as "bridging inferences." For example, if a reader came across the following sentences together, they would need to have inferred that the sentences are related to one-another if they are to make any sense of the text as a whole: "Mary poured the water on the bonfire. The fire went out." [5] The type of inference drawn here is also called a "causal inference" because the inference made suggests that events in one sentence cause those in the next. Backward inferences can be either logical, in that the reader assumes one occurrence based on the statement of another, or pragmatic, in that the inference helps the reader comprehend the story coherently, like in the previous example.

See also

Related Research Articles

Cognitive psychology Subdiscipline of psychology

Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning.

Natural language processing Field of computer science and linguistics

Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to process and analyze large amounts of natural language data. The goal is a computer capable of "understanding" the contents of documents, including the contextual nuances of the language within them. The technology can then accurately extract information and insights contained in the documents as well as categorize and organize the documents themselves.

Cognitive linguistics is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from cognitive science, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and linguistics. Models and theoretical accounts of cognitive linguistics are considered as psychologically real, and research in cognitive linguistics aims to help understand cognition in general and is seen as a road into the human mind.

Analogy cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject to another

Analogy is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject to another, or a linguistic expression corresponding to such a process. In a narrower sense, analogy is an inference or an argument from one particular to another particular, as opposed to deduction, induction, and abduction, in which at least one of the premises, or the conclusion, is general rather than particular in nature. The term analogy can also refer to the relation between the source and the target themselves, which is often a similarity, as in the biological notion of analogy.

Inferences are steps in reasoning, moving from premises to logical consequences; etymologically, the word infer means to "carry forward". Inference is theoretically traditionally divided into deduction and induction, a distinction that in Europe dates at least to Aristotle. Deduction is inference deriving logical conclusions from premises known or assumed to be true, with the laws of valid inference being studied in logic. Induction is inference from particular premises to a universal conclusion. A third type of inference is sometimes distinguished, notably by Charles Sanders Peirce, contradistinguishing abduction from induction.

Jerry Fodor American philosopher

Jerry Alan Fodor was an American philosopher and the author of many crucial works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. His writings in these fields laid the groundwork for the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses, and he is recognized as having had "an enormous influence on virtually every portion of the philosophy of mind literature since 1960." Until his death in 2017 he held the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Rutgers University.

The language of thought hypothesis (LOTH), sometimes known as thought ordered mental expression (TOME), is a view in linguistics, philosophy of mind and cognitive science, forwarded by American philosopher Jerry Fodor. It describes the nature of thought as possessing "language-like" or compositional structure. On this view, simple concepts combine in systematic ways to build thoughts. In its most basic form, the theory states that thought, like language, has syntax.

The study of how language influences thought has a long history in a variety of fields. There are two bodies of thought forming around this debate. One body of thought stems from linguistics and is known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. There is a strong and a weak version of the hypothesis which argue for more or less influence of language on thought. The strong version, linguistic determinism, argues that without language there is and can be no thought while the weak version, linguistic relativity, supports the idea that there are some influences from language on thought. And on the opposing side, there are 'language of thought' theories (LOTH) which believe that public language is inessential to private thought. LOTH theories address the debate of whether thought is possible without language which is related to the question of whether language evolved for thought. These ideas are difficult to study because it proves challenging to parse the effects of culture versus thought versus language in all academic fields.

Discourse analysis

Discourse analysis (DA), or discourse studies, is an approach to the analysis of written, vocal, or sign language use, or any significant semiotic event.

Retrodiction is the act of making a "prediction" about the past.

Relevance theory Theory of cognitive linguistics

Relevance theory is a framework for understanding the interpretation of utterances. It was first proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson and is used within cognitive linguistics and pragmatics. The theory was originally inspired by the work of Paul Grice and developed out of his ideas, but has since become a pragmatic framework in its own right. The seminal book, Relevance, was first published in 1986 and revised in 1995.

Outline of thought Overview of and topical guide to thought

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to thought (thinking):

Reciprocal teaching is an instructional activity that takes the form of a dialogue between teachers and students regarding segments of text for the purpose of constructing the meaning of text. Reciprocal teaching is a reading technique which is thought to promote students' reading comprehension. A reciprocal approach provides students with four specific reading strategies that are actively and consciously used to support comprehension: Questioning, Clarifying, Summarizing, and Predicting. Palincsar (1986) believes the purpose of reciprocal teaching is to facilitate a group effort between teacher and students as well as among students in the task of bringing meaning to the text.

Reciprocal teaching is best represented as a dialogue between teachers and students in which participants take turns assuming the role of teacher. -Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar

Psychology of reasoning Study of how people reason

The psychology of reasoning is the study of how people reason, often broadly defined as the process of drawing conclusions to inform how people solve problems and make decisions. It overlaps with psychology, philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, logic, and probability theory.

Causal reasoning is the process of identifying causality: the relationship between a cause and its effect. The study of causality extends from ancient philosophy to contemporary neuropsychology; assumptions about the nature of causality may be shown to be functions of a previous event preceding a later one. The first known protoscientific study of cause and effect occurred in Aristotle's Physics. Causal inference is an example of causal reasoning.

Susan Gelman American psychologist

Susan A. Gelman is currently Heinz Werner Distinguished University Professor of psychology and linguistics and the director of the Conceptual Development Laboratory at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on cognitive development, language acquisition, categorization, inductive reasoning, causal reasoning, and the relationship between language and thought. Gelman subscribes to the domain specificity view of cognition, which asserts that the mind is composed of specialized modules supervising specific functions in the human and other animals.

An interpretive discussion is a discussion in which participants explore and/or resolve interpretations often pertaining to texts of any medium containing significant ambiguity in meaning.

Capacity theory is the theoretical approach that pulled researchers from Filter theories with Kahneman's published 1973 study, Attention and Effort positing attention was limited in overall capacity, that a person's ability to perform simultaneous tasks depends on how much "capacity" the jobs require. Further researchers - Johnson and Heinz (1978) and Navon & Gopher (1979) - went further with Kahneman's study.

Raymond W. Gibbs Jr. was a Psychology professor and researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research interests are in the fields of experimental psycholinguistics and cognitive science. His work concerns a range of theoretical issues, ranging from questions about the role of embodied experience in thought and language, to looking at people's use and understanding of figurative language. Raymond Gibbs's research is especially focused on bodily experience and linguistic meaning. Much of his research is motivated by theories of meaning in philosophy, linguistics, and comparative literature.

Jane Oakhill is a British cognitive psychologist and expert on the development of reading comprehension. She holds the position of Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Sussex.

References

  1. Schank, R. C. (1976). The role of knowledge in language processing. In C. Cofer (Ed.). The nature of human memory. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.
  2. McKoon, G., & Ratcliff, R. (1986). Inferences about predictable events. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. 12, 82-91.
  3. Keefe, D. E., & McDaniel, M. A. (1993). The time course and durability of predictive inferences. Journal of Memory and Language, 32, 446–463.
  4. Cook, A. E., Limber, J. E., & O’Brien, E. J. (2001). Situation-based context and the availability of predictive inferences. Journal of Memory and Language, 44, 220-234.
  5. Singer, M., Halldorson, M., Lear, J. C., & Andrusiak, P. (1992). Validation of causal bridging inferences. Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 507-524.