INDIVIDUAL-DIFFERENCES IN THE TIME-COURSE OF INFERENTIAL PROCESSING

Although less skilled readers perform poorly on tasks that require inf erence generation, it is difficult to know whether their performance r esults from deficits in inferential abilities or failure to encode acc urate discourse representations. These experiments contrasted skilled and less skilled readers' ability (a) to execute a process necessary t o represent the meaning of a discourse (i.e., to select the context-ap propriate sense of an ambiguous word) and (b) to generate knowledge-ba sed inferences. Ss read passages that contained homograph primes and r esponded to lexical decision targets. Both skilled and less skilled re aders responded faster to appropriate than to inappropriate associates of homograph primes, whereas only skilled readers showed facilitation to topic-related words relative to unrelated control words. It is arg ued that deficiencies in basic linguistic processes alone cannot accou nt for less skilled readers' failure to generate topic-related inferen ces.