Reading as reasoning: A study of mistakes in paragraph reading.

TLDR

Reading is often considered a simple habit, yet little has been examined about how known word meanings combine into the meaning of a sentence or paragraph. The study aims to demonstrate that reading is an elaborate process involving weighing elements, organizing relations, selecting connotations, rejecting others, and coordinating multiple forces to produce a final response. The authors illustrate this by analyzing how answering simple questions about a paragraph engages all these reasoning components. They find that even simple paragraph comprehension requires the full suite of reasoning features typical of complex reasoning.

Abstract

It seems to be a common opinion that reading (understanding the meaning of printed words) is a rather simple compounding of habits. Each word or phrase is supposed, if known to the reader, to call up its sound and meaning and the series of word or phrase meanings is supposed to be, or be easily transmuted into, the total thought. It is perhaps more exact to say that little attention has been paid to the dynamics whereby a series of words whose meanings are known singly produces knowledge of the meaning of a sentence or paragraph. It will be the aim of this article to show that reading is a very elaborate procedure, involving a weighing of each of many elements in a sentence, their organization in the proper relations one to another, the selection of certain of their connotations and the rejection of others, and the cooperation of many forces to determine final response. In fact we shall find that the act of answering simple questions about a simple paragraph like the one shown below includes all the features characteristic of typical reasonings.