抄録
This paper examines the effect of preceding context in enhancing the comprehension of gapping structures in English. A test was conducted with four groups of high school students. Two of them were a higher-level control and an experimental group and the other two were lower-level counterparts. The contextual effect was observed significantly between the two higher-level groups whereas it was not found between the lower-level groups. Thus, it was concluded that only higher-level learners can employ preceding context as a tool for top-down reading through inferencing. Concurrently, as the lower-level learners demonstrated, relative lack of necessary language competence causes a hindrance to the successful utilization of the top-down processing.
