Aspects of Comprehension 581but does not offer the learner much in the way of useful,
transferable knowledge.
Another way to test text memory is through methods
that focus on the recall of text. Commonly, summarization
is used to assess recall of text, especially because longer texts
lend themselves to reproduction of their macrostructure but
not their microstructure (Bartlett, 1932). Presumably this
result occurs because recall of a text progresses in a top-down,
hierarchical manner through a text representation (e.g.,
W. Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978; Lorch & Lorch, 1985). Indeed,
evidence does demonstrate that facilitating text organization
produces better recall. An extensive literature on advance or-
ganizers (Corkill, 1992; see also Ausubel, 1960) suggests that
use of advance organizers presented before learning may fa-
cilitate recall and organization of knowledge. Studies on
expository text (e.g., Lorch & Lorch, 1995; Lorch, Lorch, &
Inman, 1993) have found that text components that signaled
the structure of a text produced better memory for text ideas
and their organization. In a study that included writing quality
as an independent variable, Moravcsik and Kintsch (1993)
found that well-written, organized texts facilitated recall.
Well-written texts may offer another advantage to students
other than the ease with which text macrostructure is identified
and encoded—these texts also may require less background
knowledge and facilitate more complete understanding than
poorly written texts. It is important to recognize that the recall
of a text is only as good as the individual’s representation of
the text. Thus, in cases in which an individual develops an in-
complete or erroneous representation of the text, the summary
of the text will reflect those problems. Especially in cases
when individuals lack requisite background knowledge or
when the subject matter is technical, well-written and well-
organized texts may be critical to encourage complete, accu-
rate representations of text. Again, although recall memory for
a text can be quite good depending upon the quality of the
textbase representation, recall memory is limited in use to
tests of knowledge rather than applications of it.
Inferences
Inferences in text comprehension play a crucial role in com-
prehension. The total information that is necessary for a true
understanding of a text is rarely stated explicitly in the text.
Much is left unsaid, with the expectation that a well-informed
and motivated reader will fill it in. Indeed, texts that aspire to
be fully explicit, like some legal documents, are very hard
and boring to read. For most texts, readers must construct the
meaning of a text—although this task requires sufficient
clues for processing, overwhelming readers with redundant
and superfluous cues is not to their advantage at all. How
people infer what is not stated explicitly in a text has been an
active topic of investigation among text researchers. It also
has been a fairly confused issue, because researchers have
not always distinguished adequately between different types
of inferences.
Inferences are often directed toward linking different parts
of a text. One distinction that must be made in this respect is
between the cohesion and coherence of a text. Cohesion
(Halliday & Hasan, 1976) refers to the linguistic signals that
link sentences in a passage; that is, it is a characteristic of the
linguistic surface structure of a text. Typical cohesive de-
vices, for instance, are sentence connectives, such as butor
however.Coherence(van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983) refers to
linkages at the propositional level, which may or may not be
signaled linguistically. For instance,(a) The weather was sunny all week. But on Sunday it snowed.is both cohesive and coherent, whereas(b) The weather was sunny all week. On Sunday it snowed.lacks the cohesivebut,but is nevertheless coherent because
of our knowledge thatSundayis a day of theweek. Although
linguists typically study cohesion, most of the psychological
research concerns coherence. In general, explicit cohesive
markers in a passage allow for faster processing but do not
affect recall if coherence can be inferred without them
(Sanders & Noordman, 2000).
Bridging inferences are necessary to establish coherence
when there is no explicit link between two parts of a passage,
as in (b). Bridging inferences have been studied extensively
(Haviland & Clark, 1974; Myers et al., 2000; Revlin &
Hegarty, 1999). They are necessary for true understanding,
because otherwise the two parts of the passage would be
unrelated in the mental representation of the text.
However, not all inferences have to do with coherence.
Elaborative inferences do not link pieces of text, but rather
enrich the text through the addition of information from the
reader’s knowledge, experience, or imagination. Thus, elabo-
rations link a text with the reader’s background, fulfilling a
very important function, as is further discussed in the section
on learning from texts.
Much of what is called inferencing has already been
discussed in this chapter’s section on long-term working
memory. For instance, the so-called inference in (b) is not a
true inference at all, but represents automatic knowledge
activation. Readers do not have to actively infer thatSunday
andweekare related in a certain way—they know it automat-
ically and their long-term working memory provides them
with the necessary coherence link. We are dealing here not