LAS INFERENCIAS COGNITIVAS Y LINGÜÍSTICAS EN PRUEBAS DE COMPRENSIÓN E INTERPRETACIÓN AUDITIVAS: OCURRENCIA Y FUNCIONAMIENTO.

The aim of this study was, first, to report on the occurrence of linguistic and cognitive inferences in the listening section of a well-known international test (FCE) and, second, to determine the role these inferences play in the decoding of the audio texts by four groups of university students. Linguistic inferences are categorized into a) entailments, b) presuppositions, and c) implicatures. Cognitive inferences, on the other hand, are dealt with as a whole. After determining which test items required the elaboration of a certain type of inference to be answered correctly, we compared the results obtained by the different groups of students in these items with the results obtained in items which contained explicit information only. We then compared the results obtained in those items that required the elaboration of linguistic inferences in order to determine which of the three above-mentioned categories posed the greatest difficulty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]