Asghar Iran-Nejad

Comprehension processes and eye movement patterns in the reading of surprise‐ending stories

This study investigates the pattern of eye movements of skilled adult readers when encountering a surprise ending to a story. Subjects read three surprise‐ending stories while their eye movements were being monitored. As a control condition, some of the stories they read gave the surprise away at the beginning. There was an increase in the number of fixations associated with rereading the surprising lines of the stories when compared to the same lines in the control condition. There was also a small increase in the mean duration of fixations on the surprising lines, but there was no change in mean saccade length. These results suggest that even processing at the discourse level must be considered as an influence on the eye movement control system.

Metaphor and Conservation in Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children.

Eight profoundly deaf and six hard-of-hearing children participated in the study. The deaf children had hearing losses of 90dB or greater with a mean hearing loss of 98dB, and the hard-of-hearing children had losses ranging from 27db-85dB with a mean hearing loss of 65dB. All children had a bilateral loss in the speech range 500-2000 Hz (ISO). All of the children ranged in age from 11 years to 16 years 9 months (mean = 13 years) and ranged in IQ from 90-124 (mean = 107). The average language grade level of the hard-of-hearing children was 5.0, and their average reading grade level was 5.4. The average language grade level of the deaf children was 3.2, and their average reading grade level was 3.6.All of the children were presented conservation of liquid and weight problems and 12 metaphor items. The results suggest that hearing loss does not affect the solution of either conservation or metaphor. Intelligence and age factors both affected conservation and metaphor performance; however, the ability to conserve appeared to be the best predictor of metaphor comprehension.

A nonconnectionist schema theory of understanding surprise‐ending stories

This paper compares two different ways of thinking about mental schemas that people use to comprehend and remember discourse. A parallel distributed processing (PDP) schema theory postulates that knowledge schemas are stored as connection weight patterns among units in an associative network. A nonconnectionist biofunctional schema theory, on the other hand, assumes that the brain stores no connection information. All knowledge is live knowledge created by the ongoing activity of the brain. Distributed constellations of specialized brain microsystems create and uphold schemas much in the same way, by analogy, that burning constellations of color‐coded light bulbs create and uphold colorful patterns of light. Three experiments are reported testing the predictions of the two theories using surprise‐ending stories, which have the special property of permitting two alternative interpretations of the same physical text. PDP schema theory implies that the two interpretations are built on two separate sets of un...