Predictive inferences occur on‐line, but with delay: Convergence of naming and reading times

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Abstract
Naming and word reading times were used to investigate the time course of predictive inferences. Priming contexts were followed to disambiguating sentences in which a target word either confirmed or disconfirmed the consequence suggested by the context. In Experiment 1, sentences were presented word by word at a predetermined pace; readers pronounced the target word, which appeared either 500 or 1250 ms after the onset of the last word in the priming context. In Experiment 2, the participants read sentences one to four words at a time using the self‐paced moving‐window technique; reading times for the target word, the posttarget region, and the last word in the disambiguating sentence were collected. There was facilitation (a) in naming the confirming target word when it was primed in the 1250‐ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), but not in the 500‐ms SOA; and (b) in reading the confirming target word plus the posttarget region (spill‐over effect), but not in the target word itself. These results suggest that predictive inferences occur on‐line, but require time to be drawn and that they are initially encoded to some degree, but completed later.