Different types of inferences: What are inferences used for?
Whether experimental or review in purpose, most studies have laid out meticulously detailed analyses of the types of inference that exist in their authors’ view of comprehension. The literature has been prolific in distinguishing various types and categories of inference, ranging from thirteen, described in Graesser et al. (1994), nine in Pressley and Afflerbach (1995), to the more usual two, adopted by many more researchers. Even amongst those experts who have identified essentially the same single distinction between two types of inference, there is an assortment of labelling. Commenting on this variety in the naming of inferences, Graesser et al.
(1994) concluded researchers in psycholinguistics and discourse processing have proposed several taxonomies of inferences [cites eight publications] but a consensus has hardly emerged, A suitable starting point is perhaps the work of the British researchers, Cain, Oakhill and Yuill, aided over the years by numerous colleagues, who have been studying various aspects of comprehension since the 1980s. Their distinction (Cain and Oakhill, 1999) was between text-connecting or intersentence inferences and gapfilling inferences. The difference they specified was that intersentence / textconnecting inferences are necessary to establish cohesion between sentences and involve integration of textual information. Gap-filling inferences, by contrast, make use of information from
Whether experimental or review in purpose, most studies have laid out meticulously detailed analyses of the types of inference that exist in their authors’ view of comprehension. The literature has been prolific in distinguishing various types and categories of inference, ranging from thirteen, described in Graesser et al. (1994), nine in Pressley and Afflerbach (1995), to the more usual two, adopted by many more researchers. Even amongst those experts who have identified essentially the same single distinction between two types of inference, there is an assortment of labelling. Commenting on this variety in the naming of inferences, Graesser et al.
(1994) concluded researchers in psycholinguistics and discourse processing have proposed several taxonomies of inferences [cites eight publications] but a consensus has hardly emerged, A suitable starting point is perhaps the work of the British researchers, Cain, Oakhill and Yuill, aided over the years by numerous colleagues, who have been studying various aspects of comprehension since the 1980s. Their distinction (Cain and Oakhill, 1999) was between text-connecting or intersentence inferences and gapfilling inferences. The difference they specified was that intersentence / textconnecting inferences are necessary to establish cohesion between sentences and involve integration of textual information. Gap-filling inferences, by contrast, make use of information from