THE AVAILABILITY OF CAUSAL INFORMATION DURING READING

We conducted five experiments to examine readers' access to background ed causal information in the absence of a local coherence break. Parti cipants read surprise-ending stories in which some story actions were explained by information in the preceding context, as well as informat ion about the protagonist's ulterior motives disclosed in the story's conclusion. Some participants received information about the story's e nding before reading the story, whereas other participants received no prior information. We found that participants who received prior know ledge about the story exhibited longer reading times for actions relev ant to this knowledge, used this knowledge to explain the actions, and recalled more ideas from the story than did participants with no prio r knowledge. We discuss the implications of these results for evaluati ng the constructionist model of inferential processing.