Inferencias en memes y noticias digitales sobre política: una prueba de comprensión multimodal en estudiantes universitarios costarricenses

When we encounter a political event, heated discussions are often generated on social media, which are complemented by memes and digital news. This highlights the need to explore how these texts are understood. The aim of this research is to describe the inferences made by students of Business Administration at the National University after exposure to these texts, using a test designed to assess inferences. A qualitative approach was applied, with an initial pilot, expert reviews, and the evaluation of 40 first- and fourth-year students through six stimuli (three memes and three digital news articles). The results revealed that memes generated more expected inferences (91.67% recognition of referents) compared to news articles (63.33%), as well as a higher identification of logical-semantic relationships in memes (82.5%) compared to news articles (30%). It was found that the focus on building optional inferences related to news was mainly verbal (94.7%), while in memes, most of the focus was on integration (59.10%), followed by the graphic mode (22.72%). Finally, the most common intentions were those specific to each genre. The paper concludes with recommendations for future research on multimodal texts.