Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: This study investigates the effects of attentional control on the hemispheric processing of predictive inferences during reading. Participants read texts that were either strongly or weakly constrained towards a predictive inference and performed a lexical decision task to inference-related target words presented to the right or left visual field— hemisphere. Facilitation for strongly constrained predictive inferences was greater than facilitation for weakly constrained predictive inferences in both hemispheres. Readers with high attentional control showed significant facilitation for strongly constrained inferences in the both hemispheres, but only showed significant facilitation for weakly constrained inferences in the left hemisphere. Readers with low attentional control did not show significant facilitation in any of the conditions. These results suggest that readers with high attentional control may have an advantage for generating predictive inferences during reading, a skill which could contribute to improved situation model construction and comprehension compared to readers with low attentional control.
Author: Michael Christopher Shutzenhofer
Institution: DePaul University
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1932387069