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…

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…

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,…