RELATIVE INHIBITION FOLLOWING THE ENCODING OF BRIDGING AND PREDICTIVE INFERENCES

Inferences that maintained text coherence and inferences about predictable events were examined within a word recognition paradigm previously used in investigations of anaphor resolution. Although relative facilitation has been found for explicit targets involved in anaphoric inferences, in Experiment 1, relative inhibition was found for explicit targets involved in inferences that established local coherence. Experiment 2 demonstrated that this relative inhibition effect was specific to inference-related explicit targets. In Experiment 3, recognition instructions that allowed participants to respond positively when a target had been read or thought about eliminated the inhibition effect, supporting a source-monitoring explanation. Experiments 4, 5, and 6 replicated the results of the 1st 3 experiments with predictive inferences. These data provide evidence that predictive inferences, like bridging inferences, are encoded during reading.