予期的推論の生成は日本人EFL学習者の読解にどのような影響を与えるか : 理解,文単位の処理,推論生成のタイミングに焦点を当てて

抄録

When reading a certain text, readers often anticipate what will happen next in the situation that is being described; in other words, readers generate predictive inferences. The present study examined the effects of these inferences on Japanese EFL learners' text comprehension and sentence processing, and explored how these effects differed depending on the timing of the generation. In Experiments 1 and 2, the results revealed that the predictive inference generation did not have an impact on text comprehension, regardless of when readers made predictions. However, the results from Experiment 2 showed that only in an earlier portion of a text did the predictive inference generation increase reading times for a sentence immediately following. These results suggest that the generation of predictive inferences during reading is more likely to affect readers' sentence processing than text comprehension. These results are discussed in the light of the process involved in building a mental representation.