We examined knowledge-based inference in 6-, 8- and 10-year-olds. Participants listened to texts where the number of clues for an inference was manipulated and then judged whether single-word probes (target inference, competing inference, literal word from the text and an unrelated concept) were related to the story. Accuracy and response times…

The current study examined whether readers encode the thoughts of story characters. Participants read narratives in which characters were described as either needing or not needing to remember a list of words. Across several experiments readers recalled more words in a free recall task when the story character was described as making an effort to…

In some narratives one world is embedded within the main world of the story, which we refer to as the base world, and elements from one world can cross over into the other. This study explored the conditions in which readers perceive character crossover as being likely to occur. Participants read stories that set up the potential for a character…

This study assessed the relative contribution of situational and memory-based influences to the reader's monitoring of complex narrative goal structures. In 2 experiments, people read stories according to which 2 collaborative subgoals had to succeed for a main goal to be achieved. At a story target region describing an attempt on the main goal,…

Three experiments investigated how readers manage their mental representations during narrative comprehension. The first experiment investigated whether readers' access to their mental representations of the main character in a narrative becomes enhanced (producing a "benefit") when the character is rementioned; the first experiment also…