Non-contingent processes in reading

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Critical processes that unfold while reading, and a great deal of the important effects on the reader, are not tied directly to the words of the text. These processes include affective and aesthetic reactions of the reader, integration of the material with personal knowledge and experience, elaborations and remote inferences, and contemporaneous processes unrelated to reading goals. Such processes do not directly contribute to a mental representation of the text in common models of reading, but are essential nonetheless. I refer to these as non-contingent reading processes to highlight their lack of close connection to the text. In many cases, non-contingent processes are essential for affecting readers' opinions and behaviour, enhancing their enjoyment of the text, and providing motivation for reading in the first place. Thus, an understanding of such processes is an essential part of the analysis of how reading functions in people's lives and in our culture. In the proposed research, I will develop a theoretical framework for understanding non-contingent processes and their implications, and I will implement new paradigms for investigating the related phenomena. In my proposed theoretical framework, I argue that non-contingent processing has three components: a trigger stimulus that initiates the processing, resources and capacities that are needed during the processing, and post-reading effects that can be measured after reading. Based on this analysis, non-contingent processes can be functionally distinguished in terms of their initiating stimuli: Coherence processes are processes that depend on discrepancies among different aspects of the textual information. Relevance processes are those that depend on the relation between the text and the reader's personal knowledge and experience. And finally, extratextual processes are those that are stimulated by events in the environment or unrelated mental events. The proposal funding will support the development of novel reading paradigms that will provide new evidence on each of these different types of processes. While aspects of non-contingent processing have been investigated previously, the present proposal provides the first general account of how such processing is initiated, is carried out, and has its effects. By treating the different types of non-contingent processing within the same theoretical framework, it will be possible to establish the commonalities and functional similarities among them. The proposed research will provide novel approaches to investigating these similarities, and the empirical evidence to be collected will support a common understanding of these phenomena. This understanding will advance the field of discourse processing in a new direction and will further its application to problems of reading comprehension, the acquisition of reading skills, and the role of narrative in our culture.