ABSTRACT This study investigated the effects of discourse goals on argumentative dialogues among Chinese fourth-grade elementary students, focusing on four controversial topics in the Morality and Law subject. Following a quasi-experimental design, five classes (n = 168) were assigned to one of two discourse goal conditions: Persuasion Dialogue (PD) or Deliberation Dialogue (DD). For each intervention topic, PD and DD condition students participated in two sessions of dyadic dialogues. The findings revealed distinct advantages associated with each discourse goal: while DD condition dialogues incorporated both competitive and collaborative talk, PD condition dialogues remained primarily competitive. However, PD condition dyads demonstrated enhanced competence in making direct counterarguments and in using evidence to bear on claims, and these argumentation skills were effectively transferred to postdialogue individual expository writing. Persuasion—a goal more familiar to children—may thus serve as a productive starting point for developing foundational argumentation skills. Over time, teachers could introduce the deliberation goal or alternate between the two goals, enabling students to benefit from the distinctive strengths of different discourse goals.

ABSTRACT The current study examined the effects of read-aloud with a refutational text on knowledge revision, attitudes toward learning, and perceived value of learning about a science topic (birds) in kindergarten and first-grade students. Each K-1 student (n = 86) in eight classes was randomly assigned to either a refutational (n = 42) or standard informational (n = 44) text condition. The results demonstrated, on average, that the refutational-text group performed better on the science topic knowledge measure at post-test and delayed post-test. This finding indicates the superiority of the refutational text in supporting knowledge revision in young students. Notably, the positive effect of the refutational-text read-aloud on knowledge revision was consistent among students, regardless of their levels of inhibition. In contrast, there were no significant differences between the two text groups in attitudes toward learning or in perceived value of learning about the topic.

ABSTRACT This study investigated cognitive processing biases (e.g. preferences for local vs. global coherence) in inferential reasoning among 130 adolescents (of which 18 were diagnosed as autistic) when spontaneously processing narrative stories. Students were randomly assigned to either the text-only condition or a multimodal comics condition (text + image), where narratives were word-for-word the same in both conditions. After students read each story in either modality, they responded to the same set of four open-ended questions that measured their dispositional inference, instantiated as Integrative-Inferential Reasoning. Specifically, interaction among the autistic diagnosis status, modality, and comics experience was explored. Analyses using the Item Response Theory models showed that among those assigned to the comics modality, greater self-reported comics experience was associated with higher levels of integration (i.e. Integrative-Inferential Reasoning), and this comic-experience effect was significantly larger for the autistic students, who tended to have less self-reported comics experience and a strong preference for local, text-based inference. In contrast, among those with the highest level of comics experience, there was no significant difference between them and their nonautistic peers. We illustrate how the three-way interactions can be effectively visualized on the common Item Response Theory scale and discuss implications for theories and practices regarding narrative discourse processing, particularly for understanding Autistic cognition.

ABSTRACT Successful communication is not only about understanding what interlocutors say but also how they say it. It has been well established that speakers in a variety of languages utilize prosodic prominence (e.g., higher pitch, longer duration, and stronger intensity) to highlight important information, and listeners can effectively use these cues to achieve successful comprehension. Although increasing evidence on the role of prosody in language processing has been found in nontonal languages (e.g., Germanic languages) in recent years, less is known about tonal languages, despite differences in the phonetic implementation of prosodic focus between languages, such as pitch accenting in English versus pitch range expansion in Mandarin. To address this gap, the present study examines whether and how prosodic prominence influences memory for focused information and its contextual alternatives in Mandarin, using a delayed recall task with 64 participants. The results indicate that in Mandarin, prosodic prominence significantly facilitated the recall of focused words but had limited effects on the recall of focus alternatives. This study sheds light on how Mandarin listeners use prosodic cues to facilitate their native language comprehension and expands our knowledge of the role of prosody in tonal languages in general.

ABSTRACT How accurately do readers of tweets understand the stance that tweet authors intended to express? We solicited from six authors their intended stance in their May 2022 tweets about “Roe v. Wade” after the Supreme Court’s draft opinion to strike down Roe v. Wade was disclosed: in support, opposed, no opinion, or something else. We then asked 101 online participants the stance they thought the author intended to express about Roe v. Wade. Readers’ alignment with authors’ self-reported stance in each tweet ranged from as low as 33.7% to no higher than 89.1% of readers, and 25% of readers interpreted a stance opposite to the author’s intention at least once, despite authors’ high confidence that their tweets would be understood as intended. Younger and more liberal readers comprehended more accurately, but their Twitter use, gender, education, and knowledge of Roe v. Wade did not significantly predict alignment. In a follow-up study intended to rule out alternative explanations for these findings, 142 online participants also rated the stance they thought the author intended to express on the Dobbs’ decision, and a highly similar pattern emerged. These findings provide evidence that undetected conceptual misalignment may be an underappreciated factor in social media.

ABSTRACT This study investigates the resulting representations of two types of garden-path structures in English: the main verb/reduced relative ambiguity (e.g., The professor awarded the grant gained more attention from marine biologists) and the transitive/intransitive ambiguity (e.g., While the assistant shaved the actor who was overworked watched the sports news). In contrast to previous studies, we used comprehension questions that targeted both the correct and incorrect final interpretations of the ambiguous and the disambiguating region. We successfully replicated the results of previous studies under the good-enough approach: Questions targeting the initial misanalysis yielded significantly more errors in the garden-path condition. However, we also found that this condition exhibited significantly more errors across all other comprehension questions, challenging the claim that comprehenders build a complete and faithful representation of such sentences, with the lingering of the initial misanalysis stemming from an inability to inhibit it. Our results offer robust evidence that the resulting representations of garden-path sentences are often disrupted and incomplete. We discuss these findings in relation to the good-enough approach and the self-organizing models of sentence processing, which effectively explain the co-occurrence of various representations we documented. We advocate for a broader approach in future garden-path sentence research, encouraging the inclusion of diverse sentence structures and comprehension questions that probe beyond initial misanalyses.

ABSTRACT Psychology has changed a great deal during the more than 50 years I have been actively involved with it. In this essay, I try to trace these changes as I experienced them - a minor footnote to the history of psychology. This in no sense is a real history of psychology in the last 50 years - my experiences deal with only a small section of what is called psychology, and I don’t even try to be fair and balanced. This is history as it happened to me. Some brief biographical data are given in an appendix, which are necessary to understand the twists and turns of my involvement with psychology.

ABSTRACT Argumentation as a process entails a set of skills that are claimed here to be individual as well as dyadic, with the level of skill an individual brings to bear in argumentation playing a role in its success. We identify such skills in models of high-quality argumentation and then assess these skills among young adolescents from two distinctive cultures and educational backgrounds. As a means of assessing individual argumentation skills, we introduce the Individually Constructed Dialog as an assessment tool, reporting our samples to show accomplishment in some of these skills and minimal proficiency in others. The results support the utility of the Constructed-dialog task in assessing an individual’s argumentation skills, something a dialogic performance between two people cannot provide given the nonindependence between their respective contributions. Discussed are theoretical implications including ones with respect to development of epistemological understanding of argumentation, as well as uses of the Constructed-Dialog tool in research and educational contexts and its potential use as a teaching tool.

ABSTRACT When communicating with other people, it behooves us to solicit our addressees’ attention to the concepts most important to our discourse. My decade-long colleagueship with Russ Tomlin inspired me to explore linguistic devices that interlocuters use to solicit their addressees’ attention. In this article, I describe research about two such attention-soliciting linguistic devices that I conducted during the time that Russ Tomlin and I were university colleagues. In one research project, we observed that the indefinite “this” summons addressees’ attention. In another research project, we observed that spoken stress not only summons addressees’ attention but also keeps stressed concepts within addressees’ focal attention. Thus, Russ Tomlin inspired a component of my research program that in turn complemented his linguistic mission.