Individual differences in the time course of inferential processing.

Although less skilled readers perform poorly on tasks that require inference generation, it is difficult to know whether their performance results from deficits in inferential abilities or failure to encode accurate discourse representations. These experiments contrasted skilled and less skilled readers' ability (a) to execute a process necessary to represent the meaning of a discourse (i.e., to select the context-appropriate sense of an ambiguous word) and (b) to generate knowledge-based inferences. Ss read passages that contained homograph primes and responded to lexical decision targets. Both skilled and less skilled readers responded faster to appropriate than to inappropriate associates of homograph primes, whereas only skilled readers showed facilitation to topic-related words relative to unrelated control words. It is argued that deficiencies in basic linguistic processes alone cannot account for less skilled readers' failure to generate topic-related inferences.