Effort toward comprehension: Elaboration or “aha”?

Auble and Franks (1978) found that a process termed “effort toward comprehension” was important in facilitating recall of sentences. Four experiments were conducted to further elucidate the nature of this process. Two hypotheses were considered: (1)Effort toward comprehension involves greater elaboration or deeper processing of the sentence; (2)effort toward comprehension can be viewed as an “aha” experience (i.e., a state of noncomprehension followed by comprehension of the sentence). Results indicated that recall was significantly greater for subjects in conditions producing “aha” reactions. No support was found for the elaboration interpretation of effort toward comprehension.     

The relation between comprehending and remembering some complex sentences

This research concerns the distinction between processes in sentence comprehension and those in sentence memory. Comprehension was monitored by timing subjects while they decided whether a sentence was true or false of their knowledge of the world. The memory process was tapped by examining subjects' incidental memory for the sentences they had previously verified. The verification latencies indicated that at the time of comprehension, sentences likeIt is true that a fire isn't cold were often recoded into an equivalent affirmative form, namely,It is true that a fire is hot. However, negative sentences likeIt isn't true that a fire is cold were not recoded during comprehension. Recoding in recall occurred only for those types of sentences that were recoded at the time of comprehension.     

Sentences for use in memory research

To investigate the effects of effort toward comprehension on subsequent recall, Auble, Franks, and Soraci (1979) generated a series of 40 sentences which varied in comprehensibility. We presented these sentences along with 60 new sentences to 122 undergraduates at the University of New Orleans. Sentences were rated for comprehensibility both before and after cue presentation. Sentences which appear most useful for research are discussed.     

The effects of “effort after meaning” on recall: Differences in within- and between-subjects designs

In four experiments, we examined free recall of ambiguous sentences with or without corresponding cues to facilitate comprehension, using Auble and Franks’s (1978) paradigm to examine effort after meaning (Bartlett, 1932). The ambiguous sentences were studied without cues, with cues meaningfully embedded in them, with cues provided shortly before the sentence (precue), or with cues following the sentence after several seconds (delayed cue). When these conditions were manipulated within subjects, the process of cue integration in the pre- and delayed-cue conditions enhanced recall, relative to the no-cue and embedded-cue conditions. Furthermore, in a test condition in which subjects first attempted to recall the cues alone, recall was also best in the delayed-cue condition. The effects described above did not occur when the cue presentation conditions varied between subjects, and on a test of order reconstruction, there was even an advantage for sentences studied in the embedded-cue condition over those studied in the delayed-cue condition. The dissociative effects of experimental design on sentence recall and order reconstruction suggest that effort after meaning might enhance memory for study items at the cost of impairing memory for temporal order information.     

Representation-saving effects of prior knowledge in memory for simple technical prose

Prior knowledge of the content of a passage should reduce the effort required to encode the passage and facilitate its recall. This paper presents such effects of prior knowledge upon comprehension and memory of simple technical prose. The basic procedure was to collect ratings of the amount of prior knowledge for individual passage sentences and individual subjects, and then to determine whether these familiarity ratings predicted study time and recall. In order to validate the rating method, and also to obtain data on prior knowledge of individual facts, subjects also completed an objective test of prior knowledge of the passage facts. Three different encoding-task conditions were used: a self-paced study task, a forced-pace study task, and an incidental-learning task. A cued-recall test followed each condition. In the self-paced task, readers studied unfamiliar material longer than familiar material, but recalled at the same level regardless of familiarity. In contrast, familiarity did predict recall in the forced-pace and incidental tasks. This task specificity is explained in terms of the subjects’ encoding strategies. The basic effect of prior knowledge can be explained not only by the elaboration principle, but also by a representation-saving principle, which is presented in a simulation model that can account for the effects of familiarity on study time.     

Repetition and comprehension of spoken sentences by reading-disabled children

The language problems of reading-disabled elementary school children are not confined to written language alone. These children often exhibit problems of ordered recall of verbal materials that are equally severe whether the materials are presented in printed or in spoken form. Sentences that pose problems of pronoun reference might be expected to place a special burden on short-term memory because close grammatical relationships obtain between words that are distant from one another. With this logic in mind, third-grade children with specific reading disability and classmates matched for age and IQ were tested on five sentence types, each of which poses a problem in assigning pronoun reference. On one occasion the children were tested for comprehension of the sentences by a forced-choice picture verification task. On a later occasion they received the same sentences as a repetition test. Good and poor readers differed significantly in immediate recall of the reflexive sentences, but not in comprehension of them as assessed by picture choice. It was suggested that the pictures provided cues which lightened the memory load, a possibility that could explain why the poor readers were not demonstrably inferior in comprehension of the sentences even though they made significantly more errors than the good readers in recalling them.     

Changes across age groups in self-choice elaboration effects on incidental memory

The present study investigated age differences in the effects of a self-choice elaboration and an experimenter-provided elaboration on incidental memory. Adults, sixth grade, and second grade subjects chose which of two sentence frames the target fit better in a self-choice elaboration condition. They then judged whether each target made sense in its sentence frame in the experimenter-provided elaboration, then did free recall tests. Only adults recalled better the targets with an image sentence with self-choice elaboration, rather than experimenter-provided elaboration. However, self-choice elaboration was far superior for the recall of targets with nonimage sentences only for second graders. Thus, the effects of self-choice elaboration were determined both by age and by type of sentence frame.     

The role of perceptual and semantic elaboration in high- and low-imagery sentence recall

Sentence imagery effects in recall are predicted by both perceptual and semantic elaboration models. The former attributes superior recall of high-imagery sentences to the addition of perceptual network components to an existing semantic network; the latter claims that additions of semantic components are involved. In order to identify the responsible components, free associates were generated to otherwise similar high- and low-imagery sentences in a short-term memory task. In accordance with the perceptual elaboration model, associates differed in rated imagery, but not in number. In a second study, the causal role of perceptual elaboration in recall was investigated by using high- and low-imagery sentence associates as recall cues. Differential effects of cue imagery were found for high-imagery sentences, indicating that perceptual codes are in part responsible for superior high-imagery sentence recall. Evidence is presented that perceptual and semantic network components are involved in a processing trade-off, and the adequacy of present network models to explain it is discussed.     

Encoding processes and the recall of text

Two experiments investigated the proposition that the amount of cognitive effort expended to encode information will be directly related to recall of that information. While previous research has shown that amount of processing may affect recall, these studies have generally drawn on the notion of an elaborated memory representation to explain their results. In this study, the amount of processing required to correctly interpret anaphoric relations was varied while the elaboration of the memory trace was held constant. These experiments employed a self-paced reading paradigm in which subjects read a series of short paragraphs and later were cued to recall the final sentence of each paragraph. It was found that recall was significantly improved when more processing was required to correctly interpret the anaphoric relationship expressed in the final sentence. These findings suggest that encoding processes can affect recall performance without elaboration of the memory representation.     

Depth of comprehension,effective elaboration,and memory for sentences

It was hypothesized that depth of comprehension is a function of the complexity of the meaning components of a sentence that are activated during initial encoding. In four experiments, subjects were presented sentences containing either transitive causative verbs (e.g., “John opened the door”) or their intransitive noncausative counterparts (e.g., “The door opened”) and were required to produce a continuation to each sentence. Based on the above hypothesis, sentences for which the continuations induced causative interpretations should be remembered better than sentences for which noncausitive interpretations were induced. The results confirmed this hypothesis, and they are considered in relation to depth of comprehension, effective elaboration, and the role of inferences in memory for sentences.     

Picture versus question elaboration on young children's learning of sentences containing high- and low-probability content

The main purpose of the two experiments reported here was to compare the potency of two types of elaboration on children's learning of sentence content: The effects of partial picture adjuncts were compared to the effects produced by answering "why"-questions about the relationships specified in the sentences. Five- to seven-year-old children heard sentences of the form, subject/verb/direct object/preposition/instrument. Sentences contained either a high-probability or a low-probability instrument given the semantic context. In Experiment 1, sentences either were accompanied by a partial picture depicting the sentence action but omitting the instrument or were presented without a partial picture accompaniment. Recall was improved by provision of partial pictures at study. In Experiment 2, the sentences were accompanied by complete pictures depicting the sentence content. In both experiments, questioning significantly reduced recall of high-probability sentences, with recall of instruments affected especially negatively. Evidence is presented that insufficient attention to instruments may have been one mechanism mediating depressed recall of high- compared to low-probability instruments in the questioned conditions. In summary, partial pictures improved cued recall of sentences in this study; in contrast, all significant effects produced by answering why-questions were negative ones (i.e., later recall was reduced following interrogation at study).     

Levels of processing of normal and ambiguous sentences in different contexts

Summary An experiment was conducted to investigate the effect of depth of semantic analysis on the recall of sentences presented for comprehension. The depth of semantic analysis was varied by presenting 48 subjects with 24 unambiguous or lexically ambiguous sentences that were either preceded by a picture or not. Each picture showed either one or both interpretations of the respective ambiguous sentence. The sentence remained on display until the subject had pressed a key to indicate that he had understood its meaning. After the presentation of all the sentences the subjects were tested for recall. Ambiguous sentences were equally well understood as unambiguous sentences, but were better recalled when their ambiguity had been noticed. The subject's awareness of sentence ambiguity, and hence the depth of semantic analysis, was found to depend on the pictorial context in which the sentences were presentend. The pictorial context was also found to affect the depth of processing of unambiguous sentences, which, when presented without a picture, were more time-consuming in comprehension and less well recalled than when preceded by a picture. These findings provide the background for a discussion of the interrelations between the comprehension of sentences, the depth of their semantic processing, and the recall of these sentences.The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Lorenz Sichelschmidt in collecting and analyzing data and B. Jankowski in the translation of this paper from an original German version     

Is phonological short-term memory related to phonological analysis stages in auditory sentence processing?

Despite extensive research, the role of phonological short-term memory (STM) during oral sentence comprehension remains unclear. We tested the hypothesis that phonological STM is involved in phonological analysis stages of the incoming words, but not in sentence comprehension per se. We compared phonological STM capacity and processing times for natural sentences and sentences containing phonetically ambiguous words. The sentences were presented for an auditory sentence anomaly judgement task and processing times for each word were measured. STM was measured via nonword and word immediate serial recall tasks, indexing phonological and lexicosemantic STM capacity, respectively. Significantly increased processing times were observed for phonetically ambiguous words, relative to natural stimuli in same sentence positions. Phonological STM capacity correlated with the size of this phonetic ambiguity effect. However, phonological STM capacity did not correlate with measures of later semantic integration processes while lexicosemantic STM did. This study suggests that phonological STM is associated with phonological analysis processes during sentence processing.     

Direct retrieval from elaborated memory traces

Four experiments were performed to investigate the beneficial effects of elaborative processing on recall performance. Specifically, the experiments investigated J. R. Anderson's (1983) claim that increasing the number of associative pathways between propositions in a memory trace improves recall performance through direct retrieval. In this study, procedures were used that allowed the amount of elaboration to be systematically varied while the use of inferential reconstruction to aid recall was eliminated, thus providing a test of J. R. Anderson's model. Across all experiments, the results showed that recall of a name was better when it had been stored in a less elaborated memory trace. The results suggest that when reconstructive processes are eliminated, elaboration decreases rather than increases recall performance.     

Executive control is shared between sentence processing and digit maintenance: Evidence from a strictly timed dual-task paradigm

We investigated whether the comprehension of syntactically difficult sentences taxes the executive control component of working memory more than the comprehension of their easier counterparts. To that end, we tested the effect of sharing executive control between sentence comprehension and the maintenance of a digit load in two dual-task experiments with strictly controlled timing (Barrouillet, Bernardin, & Camos, 2004). Recall was worse after participants had processed one (Experiment 2) or two (Experiment 1) difficult sentences than after they had processed one or two easy sentences, respectively. This finding suggests that sentence processing and the maintenance of a digit load share executive control. Processing syntactically difficult sentences seems to occupy executive control for a longer time than processing their easy counterparts, thereby blocking refreshments of the memory traces of the digits so that these traces decay more and recall is worse. There was no effect of the size of the digit load on sentence-processing performance (Experiment 2), suggesting that sentence processing completely occupied executive control until processing was complete.     

The comprehension of familiar and less familiar idioms

The relationship between idiom familiarity and idiom comprehension was investigated. Familiar and less familiar idioms were presented in three types of sentences. The sentences were biased toward the idiom's literal meaning, biased toward the idiom's idiomatic meaning, or unbiased toward either meaning. Reading times for sentences containing less familiar idioms were longer than for sentences containing familiar idioms, but there was no significant main effect for sentence type. The familiarity by sentence type interaction was significant. In literal sentences, less familiar idioms required more reading time than familiar idioms. In idiomatic sentences, less familiar idioms required more reading time than familiar idioms. The results are interpreted as being consistent with the idiomatic processing model, which proposes that processing of an idiom's idiomatic meaning precedes processing of its literal meaning.     

Lexical information drives perceptual learning of distorted speech: evidence from the comprehension of noise-vocoded sentences

Speech comprehension is resistant to acoustic distortion in the input, reflecting listeners' ability to adjust perceptual processes to match the speech input. For noise-vocoded sentences, a manipulation that removes spectral detail from speech, listeners' reporting improved from near 0% to 70% correct over 30 sentences (Experiment 1). Learning was enhanced if listeners heard distorted sentences while they knew the identity of the undistorted target (Experiments 2 and 3). Learning was absent when listeners were trained with nonword sentences (Experiments 4 and 5), although the meaning of the training sentences did not affect learning (Experiment 5). Perceptual learning of noise-vocoded speech depends on higher level information, consistent with top-down, lexically driven learning. Similar processes may facilitate comprehension of speech in an unfamiliar accent or following cochlear implantation.     

Mental effort and elaboration: effects of accessibility and instruction

The present study examined the effects of accessibility to relevant schematic knowledge for elaboration in the associative learning of noun pairs. Fifth-grade participants performed two simultaneous tasks--associative learning and finger tapping--so that the mental effort demands of elaborating pairs that varied in accessibility could be estimated. The mental effort expended during the creation of sentence elaborations was greater for inaccessible pairs than accessible pairs. This accessibility difference was not observed when subjects were provided with the pair members in sentences. These findings confirm information-processing analyses of the elaboration process and support a knowledge-base interpretation of developmental differences in elaboration effort.     

篇章阅读理解中背景信息的通达

该研究采用实时窗口阅读技术探讨篇章阅读理解中背景信息的通达机制。在该研究所用的阅读材料中,主人公特征与目标句行为分别形成一致、冲突与冲突限制三种关系,其中,冲突限制条件下既描述了主人公与目标行为有所冲突的特征,但这些特征要么是主人公过去具有的、要么是虚假的,在此基础上,阅读材料又提供了主人公当前的、与目标句行为一致的特征描述。结果发现,不论把冲突限制条件下的冲突信息限制在过去发生,还是作为一种虚假的情况来加以描述,都不能完全消除冲突的效应,冲突限制条件下目标句阅读时间总是长于一致条件下的阅读时间,这支持了记忆基础文本加工观,说明在篇章阅读中背景信息通达不是一个更新追随的过程,过去的或虚假的背景信息也会被重新激活并影响当前信息的加工。     

The measurement of reading comprehension: How not to trade construct validity for predictive power

This paper proposes a way to measure and understand individual differences in reading comprehension. The measure is based on the theory that individual differences in reading skill reflect differences in the processing capacity of working memory. The measure of processing capacity, called the reading span test, requires subjects to read aloud increasingly longer sets of sentences and to recall the final word of each sentence in the set. Reading span, the number of final words recalled, varies from two to five for university students. According to the proposed theory, poor readers devote so much capacity to processing the sentences, that they have less residual capacity for storing and producing the final words. The ability to keep information accessible in working memory is particularly crucial for the processes that integrate each ne word with previously read information. And, indeed, reading span is highly correlated with integration processes such as computing pronominal reference, monitoring and revising comprehension errors, and making inferences. The theoretical and predictive value of the reading span measure can be contrasted with the relatively limited value of existing atheoretical and theoretical measures of reading comprehension.