Neural indicators of inference processes in text comprehension: an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging study.

During language comprehension, readers or listeners routinely infer information that has not been stated literally in a given text or utterance in order to construct a coherent mental representation (situation model). We used a verification task in a behavioral study and in an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment to investigate the inference construction process. After having read sentences that mention the outcome of an event explicitly, implicitly, or not at all, participants verified the plausibility of short statements with respect to the context of the just read sentence.

Event-related potential indicators of text integration across sentence boundaries.

An event-related potentials (ERPs) study examined word-to-text integration processes across sentence boundaries. In a two-sentence passage, the accessibility of a referent for the first content word of the second sentence (the target word) was varied by the wording of the first sentence in one of the following ways: lexically (explicitly using a form of the target word); conceptually (using a paraphrase of the target word), and situationally (encouraging an inference concerning the referent of the target word). A baseline condition had no coreference between the two sentences.

Strategic influence on the time course of predictive inferences in reading.

In the present study, we investigated how reading strategies affect the time course of online predictive inferences. Participants read sentences under instructions either to anticipate the outcomes of described events or to understand the sentences. These were followed by a target word to be named, with stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) of 500 or 1,000 msec (50- or 550-msec interstimulus interval, respectively).