日本人EFL学習者の読解における認知負荷と予期的推論生成プロセス

抄録

Previous studies have revealed a relationship between demands on cognitive resources and inference generation during L2 reading (Horiba, 1996; Yoshida, 2003), but few studies have further investigated this relationship with a focus on specific types of inferences. Therefore, the present study aimed to examine how predictive inference generation among EFL readers is affected by cognitive load during reading. The experiment was conducted with 36 Japanese university students. In a dual-task that required participants to hold word lists in memory while reading short narratives, predictive inference generation was measured with a lexical decision task and a probability judgment task. To vary demands on readers' cognitive resources, the word lists included either three or six words. The results of the lexical decision task demonstrated that readers activated predictive inferences when no word lists were being held in memory, but inference generation was impaired when readers had to maintain lists of three or six words, suggesting that the generation of predictive inferences can be resource-demanding for EFL readers. The results of the probability judgment task also suggested that reduced cognitive resources specifically affected the automaticity of inference generation and the time required to construct inferences. Based on these results, some implications were provided for EFL reading instruction.