Dl. Long et Jm. Golding, SUPERORDINATE GOAL INFERENCES - ARE THEY AUTOMATICALLY GENERATING DURING COMPREHENSION, Discourse processes, 16(1-2), 1993, pp. 55-73
Long, Golding, and Graesser (1992) and Long, Golding, Graesser, and Cl
ark (1990) have reported evidence that readers spontaneously generate
superordinate goal inferences as they read action statements in storie
s when they have sufficient time to do so (i.e., a long delay between
presentation of the inference-eliciting sentence and the test probe).
The purpose of the present study was to determine whether readers gene
rate these inferences under relatively demanding time constraints. We
used a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) procedure, a 250-ms sti
mulus onset asynchrony (SOA), and a lexical decision task to test the
prediction that superordinate goal inferences are more likely to be au
tomatically generated during comprehension than are subordinate goal i
nferences. In addition, we had subjects answer simple comprehension qu
estions in order to assess their memory for episodes in the stories. T
he data indicated that subjects who scored well on the comprehension t
est exhibited a pattern of decision latencies such that latencies to t
est words from superordinate goal inferences were facilitated relative
to test words from subordinate goal inferences within 250 ms, whereas
subjects who performed poorly on the comprehension test exhibited no
reliable differences in their latencies. These results provide support
for a global-coherence model of inference generation which argues for
the importance of causal information in constructing a coherent text
representation.