Bond, Alexander Peter (2024) Understanding the role of mentalising in reading comprehension. Doctoral thesis, York St John University.
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Text (Doctoral thesis)
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Abstract
Mentalising is the ability to recognise that other people have mental states that influence their behaviour and actions and that these mental states may differ from one’s own. Recent research suggests that mentalising may be a contributory factor in reading comprehension. Previous research has demonstrated an association between mentalising and reading comprehension in young children. However, there has been little research into the role of mentalising in adult reading comprehension, which is the focus of this thesis.
Study 1 was a proof-of-concept study that aimed to establish a link between mentalising and reading comprehension in adults. It was found that higher scores in one subcomponent of mentalising (mental state reasoning) predicted higher scores in reading comprehension, indicating that mentalising skills may be implicated in reading comprehension beyond childhood. Study 2, a systematic review, assessed mentalising tasks used in adult samples; results were used to inform task selection for Studies 3 and 4. Studies 3 and 4 investigated potential mechanisms underpinning the relationship between mentalising and reading comprehension, whereby mentalising supports the understanding of pragmatic language (indirect requests and ironic comments) during reading. To do this, Apperly’s (2018) component model of perspective-taking was applied to written pragmatic language. Apperly’s model proposes that when making pragmatic inferences, we take the perspective of characters at three stages. Firstly, when inferring characters’ mental states (sampling); secondly, when holding this information in memory (maintenance); and thirdly, when using this information to infer the meaning of a pragmatic utterance (deployment). The results of Studies 3 and 4 indicated that mentalising is drawn upon during the first two stages of pragmatic inference (sampling and maintenance), but deployment relies on other skills (e.g., working memory). Overall, these studies indicate that mentalising supports reading comprehension in adults, potentially with a specific role in sampling and maintaining information about characters’ mental states.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Status: | Unpublished |
| Subjects: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology |
| School/Department: | School of Education, Language and Psychology |
| URI: | https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/12442 |
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