Browsing by Subject "Inference"
Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item The effects of interest on inference generation while reading.(2011-09) Clinton, Virginia ElizabethA positive association between interest and learning from texts has been well noted in the literature. However, the cause of the positive association between interest and learning from text is uncertain. The primary purpose of this dissertation was to examine a potential cause, inference generation, of the positive association between interest and learning from texts. Sixty undergraduate students participated in Experiment 1 by reading two scientific texts and writing recalls and answers to comprehension questions. Topic interest and text-based interest were measured using self-reports. The results indicated that topic interest and text-based interest were indeed positively associated with learning from texts. In Experiment 2, sixty-nine undergraduate students participated by completing the same measures as the participants in Experiment 1, with the inclusion of the think-aloud task while reading. The results from Experiment 2 indicated that topic and text-based interest were both found to be positively associated with inference generation. Subsequent analyses indicated that inference generation explained (as a mediator) the positive association between both topic and text-based interest and accurate answers to comprehension questions. In contrast, inference generation was statistically independent from the positive association between topic interest and recall. Inference generation affected the strength of (as a moderator) the positive association between text-based interest and recall. The findings from both experiments are discussed in the context of interest and text comprehension theories, specifically in regards to standards of coherence. The secondary purpose of this dissertation was to determine the usefulness of Wii Fit boards as a cost-effective means of incorporating gross body movements as an indirect measure of interest. Gross body movement data from forty-two of the participants in Experiment 1 was measured while the participants read the experimental texts. The findings indicated that interest and learning from text were negatively associated with both leaning back and shifting in one's seat. These findings are discussed in the context of embodied theories of cognition.Item Emergent Multilinguals and Making Inferences in Elementary Guided Reading Groups(2017-07) Carey, LeahThis study explores the topic of inference making with young emergent multilinguals. Literature demonstrates that inference making is essential for reading comprehension (Oakhill & Cain, 2007) and that the skill of inference develops before learning how to read. Inference skills may transfer as a child learns how to read (Kendeou, Bohn-Gettler, White & van den Brock, 2008). However, there are very few studies regarding inference skill with young emergent multilinguals, that specifically account for the factors of multilingualism and from descriptive and qualitative approaches. This action-research study in a second-grade classroom with English learners focused on the following research questions: 1. How can I scaffold instruction to support inference-making during guided reading in my classroom? And, 2. What student actions and dialogues take place when my students attempt to make inferences from text and images? After thematic coding and analysis of transcriptions, journals and artifacts, findings showed that differences in prior knowledge, using visuals and explicit questioning were important considerations for supporting the learners. Learners also demonstrated a variety of modes and strategies (i.e. peer interaction, facial expressions, gestures, pointing) to explain their thinking and occasionally demonstrated their developing metacognition. The transcripts and field notes also demonstrated inconsistencies in students’ abilities to infer within texts, implying the contextual basis of making inferences and individual differences in interactions with texts (e.g., dispositions, experiences, skills). Other implications of this study include using pictures to practice comprehension skills, as the study demonstrated more discussion and ease with regards to making inferences, as decoding text was not an element of that activity. Results of this study point to the need for further study on reading comprehension with multilinguals, specifically from a framework that takes into account the experiences, culture and background of students. Additionally, a focus on the process of inference through classroom-based research, could lead to findings more relevant for practitioners and that support student learning. Further research could benefit from utilizing sociocultural and discourse frameworks to inquire about multilinguals’ multitude of developing skills and abilities.Item The interaction of structural and inferential elements in characterizing human linguistic communication.(2012-01) Lucast, Ellen IreneIs human linguistic communication different only in degree from other animal communication, or is it different in kind? If it is different in kind, can this difference best be attributed to one or a small number of core features? If so, what are these features? What role does the code itself play in characterizing human linguistic communication and what role is attributable to its communicative function? To answer these questions, I argue the following: Human linguistic communication is in fact different in kind from other animal communication; its difference can be attributed to two main factors, one coded and one communicative, that lie at the core of the phenomenon of human language; and these two factors are a discrete combinatorial system and the ability to infer others' mental states. I demonstrate that these two factors limit the function of systems which do not display them in ways that are characteristically different from the function of human linguistic communication. This work serves to update existing research on language features by integrating insight from the cognitivist research paradigm that currently prevails in linguistics. It also integrates two traditionally separate areas of inquiry, those of the functioning of the language code itself and of the inferential mechanisms that humans employ when using language for communication, to provide a more comprehensive theory on the nature of human linguistic communication.Item Reading Aeneas and Dido: suggestion and inference in Aeneid 1-4(2013-02) Marquis, Mary ChristineThis study takes an audience-oriented approach to the first four books of Vergil's Aeneid, attempting to consider interpretive issues in the text in terms of the mechanics of the reading process. My interest is in structures of suggestion and prompts to inference (the way that Vergil "says much in little, and often in silence," as Dryden put it), and in particular how Vergil's indirect methods of exposition invite the reader to construct character motivations that help them both to notice and to fill in "gaps" in the plot. Adapting concepts from Wolfgang Iser's The Act of Reading, I explore the views that the text offers the reader as he or she moves sequentially through it (the "wandering viewpoint"), and how contradictions, suggestive juxtapositions, and puzzling silences present "gaps" that challenge the reader's synthesis of information into coherent configurations of meaning, and so encourage him or her to establish consistency by drawing inferences based on the "horizon" or background formed by the series of previous views offered by the text. In each chapter of this study I focus on one key gap in the first four books of the poem and then show how a linear, "first" reading of the previous relevant views that form the "horizon" behind it allows a meaningful inference to be drawn that closes the gap. This hermeneutic method, with attention to the process of the development of meaning, tries to correct for the effect that purely formalist approaches can have of leading interpreters to "rewrite the history of [their] experience of a text teleologically," as Niall Slater (1990: 21) puts it. I argue that the outcome of the Dido and Aeneas episode, in which Aeneas ultimately affirms his commitment to his mission and leaves Carthage, has caused a critical tendency to efface, retrospectively, the provisional pictures in Book 1 suggesting that he did not originally intend to do so, and so to flatten out the path leading to the story's conclusion. A chapter-length introduction discusses these methodological considerations, and includes a discussion of reading cultures and practices in first century BCE Rome. The focus of the first chapter is Aeneas in Book 1. My discussion starts by establishing a gap in the plot relating to Aeneas' motivation, namely his ambiguously positive response Dido's offer of a permanent home in Carthage (1.595-610) and his tacit acquiescence to the implications of her statement that like him she was brought by fortuna to settle in Carthage (her implication, I argue, at 1.629). Having identified this gap, I then attempt to establish the horizon available to the reader trying to making sense of it. To do so, I turn back to the beginning of the poem and work forward through each view of Aeneas, arguing against the common opinion that the hero simply appears "despondent" about the difficulty of his mission, and arguing instead that a consistent program of suggestive strategies, both rhetorical and intertextual, encourage reader to infer that Aeneas believes himself to have been betrayed by the gods (including his unreliable mother, Venus) and has lost faith in the very legitimacy of his prophesied fate. When Aeneas sees Carthage, he marvels enviously, and I argue that the simile comparing Dido's political activity to Diana leading a chorus of nymphs, which is focalized, as Pöschl recognized, through Aeneas, suggests both his erotic excitement, as I argue with reference to the delight that "overcomes" him pertemptat, 1.502), and his unconscious attempt to accommodate his perception of the scene in front of him to the new, erotically-charged optimism that it inspires in him. The gender dynamic of the scene is troublingly inverted, but Aeneas processes the scene in a way that "fixes" it, that de-politicizes and re-feminizes Dido's anomalously masculine role. This horizon of perspectives provides the reader with a way to fill in the gap of Aeneas' ambiguous response to Dido's offer of a permanent home by constructing a plausible motivation from it--namely, that he does not decline Dido's offer, because he would like to accept it. In Chapter Two I explore how the reader is invited to construct Dido's own perceptions and motivations in Book 1. I begin by establishing a gap in the plot that relates to Dido's motivation, namely why it is that when Mercury has simply made the Carthaginians "friendly" toward the Trojans (1.298ff.), Dido takes the extraordinary step of offering them settlement in her kingdom--the kingdom itself, as she initially phrases it urbem quam statuo, vestra est, "the city I am building, it is yours," 1.573). Contrary to the general opinion that Dido is simply an exceptionally generous person, I argue that when we follow references to her in sequence through Book 1, she appears not only intelligent and brave, as critics have traditionally observed, but also deceptive and self-interested, an effect that is brought about through sustained intertextual parallels to the Circe episode in Odyssey10 and Hypsipyle's deceptive welcome of Jason in Argonautica 1, as well as through allusions in Venus' narration of Dido's personal history to the literary tradition about her pre-dating Vergil's account (evidenced in Justin's epitome of Pompeius Trogus), in which she is intricately deceptive in escaping her evil brother, as well as in acquiring supporters and furthering the interests of her exiled followers. Having been allusively reminded that Dido has the quick reflexes of a practiced (albeit justified) liar, the reader has material with which to fill the gap opened up by Dido's generosity, which far exceeds the expectation set by Mercury's intervention: namely, that Dido is trying to exploit the convenient coincidence that a band of homeless Trojan warriors showed up on the doorstep of her fledgling state, which happens to be greatly in need of an army. Chapter Three examines Aeneas' inset narration of his wandering in Books 2 and 3. Scholars often wonder how Dido could think that Aeneas could and would stay in Carthage, given his narration of the oracles and prophecies directing him to Italy. As Ralph Hexter (1999: 67) articulates the general consensus, "The words of the text notwithstanding, Dido exercises her freedom, a terrible freedom, to make false inferences: that having been dissatisfied to date, Aeneas might stay with her, rather than move on, defying or ignoring oracular and prophetic pronouncements." I suggest that to a first reader, this "false" inference of Dido's appears in fact a logical way to bridge the gap opened up the conclusion of his narration, where, after a bitter exclamation about the uselessness of prophecy when it really matters (3.710-14), he ambiguously implies that in Carthage he has reached the end of his wandering (3.714-15). The reader's horizon for interpreting the significance of this remark includes not only the previous suggestions of Aeneas' disillusionment in Book 1, as discussed in my first chapter, but also his pessimistic narration throughout Books 2 and 3, which is replete with suggestions of Aeneas' frustration with the ambiguities and unreliability of prophecy. Failing to distinguish between story and discourse, between the events that are recounted and the way that they are recounted, scholars often take the mere fact that Aeneas tells Dido of the prophecies that he has been following as evidence that he expresses to her his continued commitment to his mission. When, however, one takes into account the rhetoric of Aeneas' presentation of these experiences, treating them as they are narrated, holistically, in context, they point to a very different conclusion. The reader may, therefore, bridge the gap opened by the pessimistic conclusion of Aeneas' narration of the prophecies that have thus far failed to bring him to Italy with the inference that he no longer considers them trustworthy, and may attribute the same conclusion to Dido. In the fourth and final chapter I look at the gap opened up by Dido's claim in her quarrel with Aeneas as he prepares to obey Mercury and resume his mission, that "now" Apollo's prophecies matter (4.376-78) and consider how the implication that he previously suggested otherwise accords with the readings advanced in my previous chapters, as well the horizon developed in Book 4. Taken together, I hope my chapters show the dynamic tension that runs through the whole of Aeneid 1-4 when we appreciate Aeneas' untenable desire from the very first to make Carthage his home.