Abstract
Two experiments investigated the role of world knowledge, namely scripts, during text comprehension. Subjects, undergraduate students, read the texts in which the sequences of script actions were involved and they took the sentence recognition tests immediately after reading each text. In Experiment I, each text contained three scripts. At the last block of the same script, the sentences were read more quickly than the first and the middle blocks. When important actions were deleted, increase in reading time of the sentence describing the next action was found but not when unimportant actions were deleted. These results showed the guiding effects of scripts, and the inferences of important actions were likely to be made during reading. In Experiment II, a sequence of script actions was interrupted by the other script actions or by irrelevant sentences. When the original script actions were read after the interruption, increase in reading time was not found. The results indicated that the activation of the original script was maintained at the end of the text.
