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This study investigated whether individual differences in working memory (WM) span are associated with different WM management strategies during the reading of expository text. In Experiment 1, probe questions were presented on line during reading to determine whether thematic information was maintained in WM throughout comprehension. The data indicated that readers across the range of WM span maintained thematic information in WM throughout the reading of a given passage. In Experiment 2, sentence reading times and accuracy for both topic and detail questions were measured in two conditions: when topic sentences were present and when topic sentences were absent. Subjects performed similarly across the range of WM span in the topic-present condition, but lower span subjects performed more poorly on detail questions in the topic-absent condition. In Experiment 3, the topic-present condition of the second experiment was replicated, except that subjects expected to receive questions about details only. Thematic processing and retention of topic and detail information all increased with span. Taken together, these results suggest that, for more difficult text processing tasks, high- and low-span subjects adopt different WM management strategies and these strategies influence what is learned from reading the text.

This research extends previous attempts to determine whether subjects make predictive inferences during comprehension. For example, when subjects read a passage about someone falling out of a 14th-story window, do they infer that the person is dead? Previous research in which lexical decision, word naming, and recognition tasks have been used for detecting predictive inferences has had mixed results. In experiment 1, a word-stem completion task was used to test for predictive inferences. The word stems were formed from target inferences that followed either priming or control passages. The data revealed that predictive inferences are generated only about concepts that are foregrounded in the passages. In Experiments 2 and 3, lexical decision and naming were used to test for predictive inferences. The lexical decision data replicated the word-stem completion data. A control experiment ruled out a simple context-checking explanation for the lexical decision results. The naming data indicated that this tasks was not sensitive to elaborative inference generation. The results show that readers make predictive inferences, but do so selectively.

Three experiments were conducted to isolate conditions in which readers make their representations of text more concrete by instantiating (inferring a specific instance of) category terms. In previous research using single-sentence contexts and a modified Stroop task as an on-line measure of comprehension, no evidence for instantiation was obtained. In the present experiments, the modified Stroop task was used to test for instantiation when category terms were referred to anaphorically in subsequent sentences and when the category terms served as the subjects of single-sentence contexts. The pattern of the Stroop effects was dependent upon whether typical or atypical exemplars were suggested by the context. Facilitation of color naming was obtained in the former case, and interference was obtained in the latter case when the instances followed the appropriate biasing contexts. The results highlight the role of foregrounding and context in guiding the use of elaborative inferences.