Readers' knowledge and the control of inferences in reading

Abstract

Abstract There is a consensus in the literature that inferences which contribute to the coherence of the text representation are made during reading. This study demonstrates that this is an over-generalisation and that one has to make a distinction between relations internal to the structure of the representation and relations that involve reference to the world. It is demonstrated that the reader's knowledge of the world is an important factor in controlling inferences. A number of experiments are discussed in which the role of the reader's knowledge with respect to the information to be inferred is investigated by varying the materials in terms of their familiarity to the reader, and by having readers with high and low knowledge with respect to the content domain of the text.