This action provides funds to the Air Force Office of Scientific Research for NSF's share of this jointly funded research project, the principal investigator of which is Dr. Gail McKoon of the Psychology Department of Northwestern University. The research is concerned with reading; it focusses on the ways information in memory can contribute to the inference processes that occur during reading. One source of information for inference processes is short-term memory for parts of a text that have just been read. When this information is available, it allows, for example, inferences that decide the correct referent of a pronoun, or inferences that relate causally two events described by the text. The research will test the hypothesis that short-term memory information can vary in its degree of salience and that this will affect inference processes, so that more salient information is more easily used to form inferences. A second hypothesis is that inference processes are controlled by local coherence. Propositions that are in short-term memory together because they are in the same small area of a text are said to be locally available. The idea of local coherence is that these propositions will be connected to each other only if the connections are required to make the local structure coherent. A second line of research will examine the dependence of inference processes on knowledge in long-term memory. Exploratory experiments will examine whether inferences can be driven by the lexical structures of verbs. Other experiments will examine the use of generic knowledge such as the meanings of words and the sequences of actions that form typical events. Another set of experiments will examine how the meanings of words are combined and how they are determined by context. This research forms a part of a large body of ongoing research on how people comprehend text that they read. It is relevant to such societal concerns as assisting the growing number of children and adults who can read text mechanically but cannot comprehend what they read to become truly literate.
