抄録
This study aimed at investigating whether or not any instances are instantiated (or inferred) from the category in a single sentence when the sentence was comprehended. One hundred and twelve students read 75 pairs of sentences, where the first sentence included a category term and the second sentence included a term of its instance. The comprehension times for the second sentences were measured. It was found that the context of the first sentences, which had instantiating information, affected the comprehension times on the condition where the first sentence and the second were in anaphoric relation, but such context effect was not observed on the condition where the second sentence was independent of the first. This result showed that neither instantiation nor inference of instances occurred in comprehending single sentences and that the context effect could be explained by the degree of difficulty in integrating the information of both sentences at the time of comprehending the second sentences.
