@article{Flynn_McNamara_McCarthy_Magliano_Allen_2022, place={Valparaíso, CL}, title={The Appearance of Coherence: Using Cohesive Properties of Readers’ Constructed Responses to Predict Individual Differences}, volume={54}, url={https://revistasignos.cl/index.php/signos/article/view/853}, abstractNote={<p><span style="vertical-align: inherit;"><span style="vertical-align: inherit;">Successful text comprehension requires readers to engage in a number of coherence-building processes. </span><span style="vertical-align: inherit;">This study examined how analyzing the cohesion of students ’constructed responses can be used to evaluate these coherence-building processes and the extent to which they vary across readers’ individual differences and across types of texts. </span><span style="vertical-align: inherit;">We posed two primary research questions: 1) Can we predict individual differences in working memory and reading skill based on the cohesion of students’ constructed responses to text? </span><span style="vertical-align: inherit;">2) Do the relations between individual differences and cohesion vary as a function of genre? </span><span style="vertical-align: inherit;">Participants (n = 119) generated constructed responses while reading history and science texts and completed reading skill and working memory assessments. </span><span style="vertical-align: inherit;">The current study leveraged natural language processing (NLP) techniques to analyze the cohesion of readers’ constructed responses, using cohesion as a proxy for assessing the coherence of their mental representations of the texts. </span><span style="vertical-align: inherit;">Cohesion was measured at the sentence, paragraph, and synonym levels. </span><span style="vertical-align: inherit;">Machine learning models showed that linguistic indices related to cohesion were significant predictors of both working memory and reading skill. </span><span style="vertical-align: inherit;">Additional quantitative and qualitative inspection revealed that the relations between individual differences and coherence-building processes varied depending on the text’s genre. </span><span style="vertical-align: inherit;">These findings indicate that the interaction between genre and individual differences may be used to model coherence-building processes during reading.</span></span></p>}, number={107}, journal={Revista Signos. Estudios de Lingüística}, author={Flynn, Lauren and McNamara, Danielle and McCarthy, Kathryn and Magliano, Joseph and Allen, Laura}, year={2022}, month={ene.} }