This Family and Practitioner Brief discusses how deaf children who have not had access to a complete language from birth often encounter unique challenges in developing academic language skills, particularly in the realm of inference-making.

Reading comprehension is key to knowledge acquisition and to reinforcing memory for previous information. While reading, a mental representation is constructed in the reader's mind. The mental model comprises the words in the text, the relations between the words, and inferences linking to concepts in prior knowledge. The automated model of…

As deviations from what is expected, anomalies are typically seen as an obstruction to making good predictions or an impulse to revise the predictive framework. Here, we consider a different possibility--that anomalies, particularly those related to cognitive processing, may be a valuable source of diagnostic information. More specifically, we…

The purpose of this study was to investigate bridging inferences and learning when students with low topic knowledge read multiple complementary biology texts. Using a think-aloud protocol, we assessed students' (n = 74) cognitive processes while they read one text about principles of natural selection and three texts about examples of natural…

Reasoning and inference are well-studied aspects of basic cognition that have been explained as statistically optimal Bayesian inference. Using a simplified experimental design, we conducted quantitative comparisons between Bayesian inference and human inference at the level of individuals. In 3 experiments, with more than 13,000 participants, we…

Words can be informative linguistic markers of psychological constructs. The purpose of this study is to examine associations between word use and the process of making meaningful connections to a text while reading (i.e., inference generation). To achieve this purpose, think-aloud data from third-fifth grade students (N = 218) reading narrative…

How does perceptual learning take place early in life? Traditionally, researchers have focused on how infants make use of information within displays to organize it, but recently, increasing attention has been paid to the question of how infants perceive objects differently depending upon their recent interactions with the objects. This experiment…

Children rely on both evidence and prior knowledge to make physical causal inferences; this study explores whether they make attributions about others' behavior in the same manner. A total of one hundred and fifty-nine 4- and 6-year-olds saw 2 dolls interacting with 2 activities, and explained the dolls' actions. In the person condition, each doll…

Solving new problems can be made easier if one can build on experiences with other problems one has already successfully solved. The ability to exploit earlier problem-solving experiences in solving new problems seems to require several cognitive sub-abilities. Minimally, one needs to be able to retrieve relevant knowledge of earlier solved…

Cognitive science principles should have implications for the design of effective learning environments. The self-explanation principle was chosen for the current work because it has developed significantly over the last 20 years. Early formulations hypothesized that self-explanation facilitated inference generation to supply missing information…

A large body of research has shown that incorporating text in the corresponding sections of an illustration facilitates the learning of illustrated documents. More recently, a series of studies has revealed that the use of interactive windows located close to the illustration causes similar effects. The aim of this paper is to help bring about a…

Computational models of analogy have assumed that the strength of an inductive inference about the target is based directly on similarity of the analogs and in particular on shared higher order relations. In contrast, work in philosophy of science suggests that analogical inference is also guided by causal models of the source and target. In 3…

This paper explores the role of diagrams and text in middle school students' understanding and visualisation of human body systems. We develop a common framework based on structure and function to assess students' responses across diagram and verbal modes. Visualisation is defined in terms of understanding transformations on structure and relating…

Effects of mobilizing prior knowledge on information processing were studied with 3 groups of 12 adult subjects each. The assumption that activating different kinds of prior knowledge would induce different information processing activities during subsequent text processing (inferencing or elaborating) was tested using passages about fishing…

Describes 10 categories of inferences and proposes a three-step procedure for teaching students to make inferences while reading. (HOD)