Examining the Suppression of Predictive Inferences Among Japanese EFL Readers

Abstract

Although making inferences (e.g., predictive inferences) during reading plays an important role in text comprehension, readers do not always make correct inferences and it is necessary to suppress the inferences when they are disconfirmed by the following context. However, the suppression of inferences has received little attention in previous research. Thus, the present study aimed to examine whether Japanese EFL readers suppress the inferential information which they activate during reading, focusing on predictive inferences. In addition, the effects of disconfirming the activated inferences on readers' text representations were also investigated. In the experiment, 37 Japanese university students read several sets of short narratives and engaged in probe verification and cued recall tasks. The result of the verification task showed that the activation of predictive inferences remained immediately after they were disconfirmed by the context. Moreover, the results of the cued recall task revealed that the disconfirmed inferences were not deleted but were maintained in readers' final text representations and that the disconfirmation had a negative impact on the comprehension of explicit text information. The present study suggests there is difficulty in suppressing the activated predictive inferences among EFL readers, and provides further understanding of the nature of inferential information in reading.