Use of Knowledge in the Inferential Process in Turkish

Understanding what knowledge is needed for comprehension and how it is used is also crucial for developing approaches aimed at improving reading proficiency. Within comprehension, one of the pivotal cognitive processes essential for shaping textual structure and mental representation is inference. However, research has pointed out that Turkish students struggle with making situation model-based inferences pertaining to the deep semantic structure of texts. This study investigates the role of causal knowledge in facilitating the inferential processes necessary to construct mental representations of textual structure and whether it is used in processing sentences with forward-backward causality in Turkish. Furthermore, it seeks to explore cognitive processes associated with inferential reasoning using an experimental methodology that is relatively uncommon in Turkish literature, with the aim of broadening researchers' understanding and awareness of similar methodologies. The results showed that sentences with forward causality were processed faster than those with backward causality. This file here contains the data of this research.