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Four experiments were designed to assess the presence and impact of stereotypical knowledge through an implicit measure of reading comprehension. In Experiments 1 and 3, participants read passages about protagonists in scenarios in which stereotypical knowledge was likely to become activated in memory. Following the descriptions, reading times for target sentences were slowed when they were inconsistent with stereotypical knowledge. In Experiments 2 and 4, a qualification sentence that served to explain why the protagonist would behave in a stereotypically inconsistent manner was added. With this additional information, the slowdown demonstrated in Experiments 1 and 3 for stereotypically inconsistent target sentences was eliminated. Prior research has shown it is very difficult to override activated stereotypical knowledge. The present results are important because this is the first demonstration that an appropriate qualification can at least eliminate any disruption in reading caused by stereotypical knowledge.

There is general agreement that predictive inferences are activated when there is strong contextual support in the discourse model; however, there has been debate concerning the specificity of these inferences. In a series of 3 experiments, the specificity of context was manipulated to test the effects of contextual support on inference activation. Experiment 1 demonstrated that with less specific context, activation of predictive inferences could be captured by more than 1 lexical item. Experiment 2 confirmed that this outcome was a result of inference activation and not semantic priming. Experiment 3 demonstrated that as contextual support increases, inference activation becomes increasingly constrained. Results of all 3 experiments support the assumption that inferences are not activated in an all-or-none process. (Contains 3 tables.)

Participants read a series of passages containing an action that required the use of an instrument. In Experiment 1, a naming task failed to detect activation of a target instrument when that instrument was supported in the preceding text. In Experiment 2, reading times were slow on a target sentence that contradicted the inferential information, indicating that instrument information had been activated. The combination of the results from Experiments 1 and 2 are consistent with the view that activation involves a set of features of a concept, not a specific lexical item. The results from Experiment 3 and 4 demonstrated the role of contextual support in the activation and instantiation of instrumental inferences. (Contains 7 tables.)