Stimulating inference-making in second grade children when reading and listening to narrative texts

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

Ancient ancestors for modern practices: An evolutionary concept analysis of digital marginalia

Marginalia, the notes readers write in the blank spaces of their books, are significant objects of study in bibliography and book history, among other fields. Due to factors including findability and fragile book materials, marginalia from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are difficult to study. The same does not necessarily have to be true for similar objects from the twenty-first century. This thesis uses Rodger’s evolutionary concept analysis to analyze the usage of digital marginalia in the scholarly literature from 1991 to 2020. Beginning with an overview of bibliography and the history of marginalia, this thesis situates digital marginalia in a bibliographic context. Digital marginalia’s definitions, characteristic attributes, events related to the creation of digital marginalia, and concepts related to the practice are then examined. Bringing in connections to bibliographic concepts, this thesis argues that digital marginalia and bibliography provide each other reciprocal value. Like their physical counterparts, digital marginalia provide evidence of users’ interactions with media, their social interactions through that media, and their sociocultural contexts

“’NUFF SAID”: UNDERSTANDING COMPREHENSION PROCESSES AND PRODUCTS FOR READING TEXT AND NON-LINGUISTIC GRAPHIC NARRATIVES

People encounter and comprehend narratives in a variety of modalities: text, graphic, film, audio, and others. Linguistic modalities (e.g., text, audio) require language comprehension while visual modalities (e.g., graphic, film) require visual comprehension and also language comprehension when text or audio is included. However, it is unknown whether readers engage in similar or different cognitive processes and construct similar or different comprehension products to the same extent for linguistic and non-linguistic narratives (i.e., with no text or audio). Thus, studies have not directly compared the in-the-moment (i.e., online) processes and post-reading (i.e., offline) products of comprehension across linguistic and non-linguistic narratives. A review of the current literature on graphic narrative comprehension is presented. The goal of this study was to explore the extent to which readers generate online cognitive processes and produce offline comprehension products post-reading across text and non-linguistic graphic narratives. A sample of 51 participants completed a think-aloud task with non-linguistc graphic and text versions of narratives to to assess readers’ online cognitive processes. A subsample of 48 participants also completed a recall task to assess their comprehension offline products (i.e., text / image base and situation model) post-reading. In addition, participants’ text print exposure and visual language fluency were measured to control for participants’ experience with both modalities. Overall, narrative modality had an effect on both participants’ comprehension processes and products. Post-hoc analyses revealed that during the think-aloud task, participants generated more backward-oriented inferences (i.e., anaphoric, bridging) and generated more inferences about characters’ emotions for non-linguistic graphic narratives. For text narratives, participants generated more forward-oriented inferences (i.e., predictions) and generated more statements about characters’ goals. During the recall task, participants included more emotion inferences in their situation model representation for non-lingusitic graphic narratives but included more accurate story information for their text base representation for text narratives. These findings suggest that modality (i.e., linguistic or visual information) influences how readers process and comprehend narratives and are discussed in terms of theoretical, research, and practical implications