CONSTRUCTING AND VALIDATING MOTIVE BRIDGING INFERENCES

Understanding Jane left early for the birthday party, She spent an hou r shopping at the mall requires detecting that the first statement mot ivates the second. The validation model states that before accepting t his bridging inference, the reader validates it with reference to rele vant knowledge. In particular, a mediating idea is first derived from the text outcome and its candidate motive. If the mediating idea is su pported by general knowledge, then the inference has been validated. I n tests of this analysis, experimental subjects read motive or control sequences and then answered questions probing the knowledge hypothesi zed to validate the motive inferences, such as Do birthday parties inv olve presents? Five experiments confirmed that understanding motive se quences facilitates validating knowledge. A control procedure also ref uted a priming counterexplanation of these effects (Experiment 1). Val idation processing obtained for motive-outcome statements separated by two to four sentences in coherent sequences (Experiments 2 to 4). Inf erred and explicit validating knowledge had a similar representational status (Experiment 3). Whereas proofreading abolished the validation effect, a reading strategy promoting causal processing did not enhance it (Experiment 4). A delayed priming procedure indicated that validat ing knowledge is integrated with the text representation (Experiment 5 ). The implications of these findings for the constructionist and mini mal inference analyses were explored. The validation effects were simu lated using the construction-integration model. (C) 1996 Academic Pres s, Inc.