The effect of foregrounding on readers' use of predictive inferences.

Abstract

This research extends previous attempts to determine whether subjects make predictive inferences during comprehension. For example, when subjects read a passage about someone falling out of a 14th-story window, do they infer that the person is dead? Previous research in which lexical decision, word naming, and recognition tasks have been used for detecting predictive inferences has had mixed results. In experiment 1, a word-stem completion task was used to test for predictive inferences. The word stems were formed from target inferences that followed either priming or control passages. The data revealed that predictive inferences are generated only about concepts that are foregrounded in the passages. In Experiments 2 and 3, lexical decision and naming were used to test for predictive inferences. The lexical decision data replicated the word-stem completion data. A control experiment ruled out a simple context-checking explanation for the lexical decision results. The naming data indicated that this tasks was not sensitive to elaborative inference generation. The results show that readers make predictive inferences, but do so selectively.