Automaticity and Inference Generation During Reading Comprehension

A reader must simultaneously carry out many cognitive processes while moving through a text. Each process could demand all the reader's attention and prevent any other process from occurring. However, as a reader's skill develops, some of these processes begin to demand less and less attention, thus freeing attentional resources for other, simultaneous processes. The development of automaticity is a hallmark of skilled reading, yet there are questions regarding which processes truly become automatic with practice. We intuitively know that we make a wide variety of inferences as we read that both clarify and enrich a text. However, research provides evidence that only a minimum of these inferences occur automatically. Because educators should make use of this research, recommendations are given here for fostering automaticity in inference generation.