Contextual Expectations Research Articles

Effects of constraint and expectation on reading comprehension in aphasia

Multiple-choice responses to incomplete sentence stems is a popular task for assessing and treating reading comprehension in patients with aphasia. This study investigated the influence of contextual constraint and response expectation on aphasic subjects' sentence-level reading comprehension. Constraint refers to the number of possible word completions available for a sentence stem. Expectation refers to whether the correct completions are expected or unexpected words. Subjects responded to stimulus items in which levels of constraint (high/low) and levels of expectation (expected/unexpected) were combined into four test conditions. Results indicated that the subjects performed worst on the low-constraint, unexpected-response sentences. They did significantly better with both increased constraint and with increased expectation. Both word pool and semantic feature activation are discussed as possible underlying mechanisms that influence aphasic subjects' reading comprehension of sentences.

Computational Approaches to Figurative Language

Computational approaches to figurative language are concerned with those situations in which the appropriate conceptual representation of an utterance differs fundamentally from that which could be composed from the ordinary meanings of the utterance's constituent words. The bulk of computational work in this area has addressed idiom, metonymy, metaphor, and indirect speech acts. These phenomena are generally recognized as being major impediments to the construction of successful natural language processing systems. Most such systems have attempted to deal with such figurative language through the use of extended notions of language conventions, general purpose reasoning methods, and strong notions of contextual expectations.

Problem solving beyond the logic of things: contextual effects on understanding and solving word problems

Arguments are put forward in this paper that classroom word problem solving is more-and also less-than the urgent analysis of a factual structure, in the sense that it is essentially a species of a social-cognitive activity. Word-or story-problems, presented in classroom contexts, represent textual and pragmatic patterms of a certain grammaticality. To present a problem verbally to a student means to organize a fact in some way for the attention of a problem solver. There is not only the structure of the problem text itself by which situations are denoted, but there is also the stimulative nature of the social-pragmatic context which shapes the student's textbook-problem solving behavior over a long period of time. The present paper discusses the results of several studies showing, for example, that subject matter related attitudes towards a problem frequently do not play an important part in the problem solving efforts; that students often solve problems correctly without understanding them; and that false contextual expectations can lead to abstruse errors of understanding and to peculiar solution attempts. The studies indicate that students can become sensitive and skilful in perceiving and capitalizing on subtle textual and contextual signs pointing to the solution and anticipating its pattern. It seems that usual textbook problems let students get accustomed to certain courses of processing where a simple fact, like whether an equation works out evenly or does not, can stop the process or push it further. It is argued that the deeper reason for the observed textual and contextual influences on understanding and problem solving lies in a fundamental weakness of the student's epistemic control behavior. The psychological and instructional significance of the studies is discussed.

Contextual Demands for Early Adolescent Behavioral Style

The focus of this investigation was to describe the contextual demands placed on early adolescents and to determine if these demands differ across contexts. In addition, we assessed whether adolescents could accurately perceive the demands placed on them and if their "fit" with demands differed across contexts. By focusing on demands regarding behavioral style, or temperament, and studying 101 early adolescents (56 males, 45 females), from the Pennsylvania Early Adolescent Transitions Study, we assessed adolescents' self-rated temperament and the demands placed on the adolescents by their peer group, their teachers, and their parents. Results of multivariate analyses of variance indicated that parents and peers hold different demands for behavioral style. Adolescents perceived several of their peers' demands as being significantly different than the peers' actual demands. Finally, except for one of nine attributes of temperament, the adolescents' self-rated temperament attributes exceeded the contextual expectations for behavioral style in all settings and exceeded the demands of parents and teachers more than they exceeded the demands of their peers. Limitations of the study and directions for future research are noted.

The Social Context of Effective Schools

This article analyzes differences in the operation of school effectiveness factors in high- and low-SES effective schools. Observable differences are found on several effectiveness variables. The social context of the effective schools appears to influence the breadth of the curriculum, the allocation and use of instructional time, the instructional leadership role of the principal, the nature of the school reward system, and the type of expectations embedded in school policies and practices. These findings, though tentative, indicate that practitioners should not treat the well-publicized effectiveness factors as generalizable to all school settings. In addition, the results suggest that researchers concerned with understanding the process of effective schooling should focus on the manner in which these schools translate contextual expectations into school policies and classroom practices.

Children's use of contextual expectations to detect and resolve comprehension failures

This study examined young (6 and 8 years old) children's use of contextual expectations to detect inconsistencies in story information and their ability to discriminate between information that resolved or was irrelevant to these inconsistencies. First- and third-grade children and college adults were read short stories containing event descriptions that should have led to either a strong expectation or a weak expectation about an adult character's contingent response. The character's response was inconsistent with the event. In addition, succeeding information was presented that resolved or was irrelevant to the inconsistency. Event expectations and understanding of the resolution information were examined by means of question probes. The results showed that 6-year-olds frequently detected inconsistent events though there were developmental differences both in generating expectations from event information and in resolving inconsistencies when the expectations were violated. The 6-year-olds did not discriminate between relevant and irrelevant resolution information.

Understanding ironic communication

Most definitions of ironic communication associate the phenomenon with simple communicative formulas such as saying the other or the opposite of what one means or violating a conversational maxim. While these definitions bear one grain of truth or another to the real phenomenon, they are deficient in that they fail to take account of the essentially rhetorical nature of irony. I shall argue that an adequate definition of ironic communication must make mention of the rhetorical facts that the ironist (1) makes an evaluative argument that violates contextual expectations, and (2) intends the listener to recognize that she/he has deliberately misapplied the evaluative argument. Taken together, these facts help explain both what the ironist communicates and how.

Parafoveal information is not sufficient to produce semantic or visual priming

Marcel (1978) has shown that semantic priming can occur in the lexical-decision task even if the prime is masked to the point at which its presence cannot be detected. The purpose of the present experiments was to determine if primes that begin four or five spaces to the right of fixation can also produce semantic facilitation even though they are very difficult to recog­ nize. Experiment 1 showed that facilitation did occur when the parafoveal primes used in the subsequent experiments were presented foveally. In Experiment 2, the primes were moved to the parafovea, but the task demands directed the subject's attention toward the fovea. When subjects were ignoring the information presented to the parafovea (an allocation pat­ tern that should correspond to that used during normal reading), neutral primes were just as effective as either semantically related or identical primes. In Experiment 3, the task demands were altered so that subjects were actively attending to the parafoveal primes. Although subjects were trying to process the primes, there was still no evidence that benefits could be derived from parafoveal primes. A final experiment showed that subjects given extensive practice with the materials will produce large amounts of identity and semantic priming. The results support the conclusion that readers can benefit little from the pre­ processing of information in the parafovea unless that information can be supplemented with contextual expectations.

Reading Is Communication, Too!

ABSTRACT The communicative aspect of the reading skill resides in the ability to interpret culturally authentic messages in the foreign language environment, that is, to be functionally literate in the second language. A task‐analysis procedure is useful in three areas: identification of appropriate communicative materials, strategies effective for the decoding process, and evaluation techniques that capitalize on the communicative aspect of the situation. Within thematic units developed in textbook lessons, teachers can provide guidelines that expand the reading materials to exploit communication between written messages and learners by encouraging the guessing process that the independent reader must develop. This type of activity serves to bridge the gap between controlled and liberated reading situations. A combination of language skills and contextual expectations works together so that the reader interprets the realia of the foreign culture.

Reassessing College Students' Instructional Expectations and Evaluations

End-of-course professor ratings were questioned and reconceptualized by including an initial student expectations measure. Using Stogdill (1959) as a model, contextual (classroom-related) expectations were differentiated from situational (institutional-press) expectations. Test and retest instrumentation employing factor-analysis and Critical Incident derived items with Semantic Differential scaling for 209 Ss in 8.social science classes in 3 colleges revealed significant differences between expectations and subsequent evaluations. Year in college produced little variability. If one shot ratings indicated the direction of expectations, they failed to demonstrate their intensity and scope. Since extrapolations from ratings generated only a limited understanding of student-teacher dynamics, extensions of an expectations-evaluations framework seemed appropriate.