Interactions between ease of bridging inference generation and working memory

Abstract

Although research demonstrates that bridging inferences are generated at coherence breaks, increased reading times also occur two words after a coherence break. This processing delay could be related to the ease of generating bridging inferences. To explore the cause of this processing delay, participants read texts where the ease of generating an inference was manipulated by gradually decreasing the explicitness of an action. Reading times for target sentences that followed the critical sentences increased as explicitness decreased. This effect was more pronounced in readers with high working memory, a skill that is related to inference generation. These findings provide preliminary evidence that processing delays during bridging inference generation are affected by ease of generation.