Understanding Text and Stories • 309Understanding Text and Stories
Just as sentences are more than the sum of the meanings of individual words, stories
are more than the sum of the meanings of individual sentences. In a well-written story,
sentences in one part of the story are related to sentences in other parts of the story.
Thus, the reader’s task is to use these relationships between sentences to create a coher-
ent, understandable story.
An important part of the process of creating a coherent story is making
inferences—determining what the text means by using our knowledge to go beyond
the information provided by the text. We have seen that inference is an important
part of many types of cognition. For example, in Chapter 3 we described how we
take into account what we know about the environment to perceive what is in a
scene. We also saw, in Chapter 8, how we use inference (often without realizing it) to
retrieve memories of what has happened in the past. In fact, a number of the memory
experiments we described involved remembering short passages, such as Bransford
and Johnson’s (1973) experiment in which one of the stories was about John trying
to fi x a birdhouse (see page 218).MAKING INFERENCES
One of the passages Bransford and Johnson’s participants
read wasJohn was trying to fi x the birdhouse. He was pounding the nail
when his father came out to watch him and help him do the work.We saw that after reading that passage, participants were
likely to indicate that they had previously seen the follow-
ing passage: “John was using a hammer to fi x the birdhouse
when his father came out to watch him and help him do the
work.” They thought they had seen this passage, even though
they had never read that John was using a hammer, because
they inferred that John was using a hammer from the infor-
mation that he was pounding the nail (Bransford & Johnson,
1973). People use a similar creative process to make a num-
ber of different types of inferences as they are reading a text.
The following demonstration illustrates how inference oper-
ates not only when reading text but also when interpreting a
story being told by a picture.DEMONSTRATION Making Up a Story
Assume that the picture in ● Figure 11.9 is an illustration in a book;
your assignment is to describe what is happening, in story form.
“Once upon a time” would be a good way to begin.What knowledge did you use to create your story?
Perhaps “fl ying saucers” and “attractor beams” were
involved, and you might have surmised that before the sheep
became airborne it was peacefully grazing with its friends on
the ground. You might also have assumed, since the airborne
sheep appears smaller than the ones on the ground, that it
is farther away, which would mean that the fl ying saucer is
moving toward the mountains. Because this information is●FIGURE 11.9 Goodbye, Sheep by Greg Stones. Determining
what is happening here depends on past knowledge about
spaceships, sheep, and the relation between perceived size
and distance, among other things.Used by permission; http://www.gregstones.comCopyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.