Predictive inferences during text comprehension: Comparison of local and global elaborative processing

Mental model theories of text comprehension suggest that readers use their general world knowledge to form an elaborated mental model of text-based events. In addition, mental model theories suggest that readers use their developing mental model to monitor and maintain global text coherence. However, because research on elaborative and global-coherence processing have relied on different methods, no studies have tested whether readers form elaborative inferences under global processing conditions.;Two experiments were conducted to determine whether readers will elaboratively infer the consequences of actions (predictive inference) under local and global processing conditions. For both experiments, subjects read narrative passages in which the information necessary for a predictive inference was separated by either 0 or 4 intervening sentences. In experiment 1, a constrained word-stem measure of inference priming was used to determine whether predictive inferences were activated. In experiment 2, sentence reading times were used to determine if the predictive inferences were incorporated into subject's developing mental model of text events.;In combination, the results demonstrate that readers will generate and incorporate predictive inferences under both local and global processing conditions. However, the data also suggest that readers are more likely to incorporate inferences that result from local processing. These findings support the idea that global text knowledge has far more influence on comprehension than many current theories of comprehension would suggest. In addition, the results suggest that mediating factors may influence the incorporation of inferences, once they have been activated.