Elaborative inferences during reading: do they occur on-line?

Four experiments were conducted to examine the extent to which readers construct elaborative inferences on-line during reading. In Experiment 1, gaze durations were measured while subjects read anaphors to target antecedents that referenced a particular category member either explicitly or implicitly. When the context strongly suggested a particular category member, gaze durations on an anaphor were the same following either an implicit or an explicit antecedent. When the context did not suggest any particular category member, gaze durations were significantly longer following an implicit antecedent. The results confirmed that, with sufficient context, readers will generate a simple elaborative inference on-line. These results were replicated in Experiment 2 in which the materials did not strongly signal the inference but a sentence designed to encourage subjects to infer was included. In Experiment 3, this "demand sentence" was not included, and readers did not appear to construct the targeted inference. The results of Experiment 4 confirmed that once generated, elaborative inferences are stored as part of the long-term-memory representation of a passage.