Features to Match

In documents where meaning may be carried by icons, lines, or colours, matching is made more difficult as the number of features to be matched increases. In general, a match made on one feature is fairly easy. A typical task requiring a single feature match would be to pick items off a menu that have the ‘heart-smart’ symbol. A more difficult task would be to pick out the heart-smart items that don’t contain dairy products. (Note that in this case, the diner would have to infer what constitutes a dairy product before attempting the match.)

Inference Needed

In general, ‘inference’ refers to the ability to ‘read between the lines,’ or to reach a conclusion based on partial information. Inference is a cognitive skill that is critical for proficient reading. Much of our reading behaviour is based on predictions and inference is needed to make most of those predictions.

Literacy tasks are made easier if the given information in the question or directive is identical to or synonymous with that found in the text, or if it has an easily identifiable categorical relationship (pet: cat/dog/fish; income: wages, annuities, pensions).

For example, if a directive on a form asks the respondent to ‘check the box of the age group into which they fit,” the task will be easier if the boxes are marked ‘age groups.’ The task will be more difficult if the boxes to be marked are not labelled, or if they are labelled ‘age divisions,’ or ‘generational increments.’

Matching is made easier when the answer to a question appears in a ‘paradigmatic’ context. In this paradigmatic context, the synonymous word appears as the same part of speech in the same grammatical structure, and is accompanied by one or more words identical to those found in the question. For example, consider the question “What are my CPP pension credits?” It will be easier to answer this question if the text contains an answer in a paradigmatic context. It would start with “Your CPP pension credits are . . .”