Instrument inferences in sentence encoding.

Reading comprehension is an active inferential process. What factors control inferences? This paper examines the possibility that highly probable inferences are drawn even when they are unnecessary for comprehension. Three experiments are reported in which subjects read a list of sentences, each describing an action that accepts a highly likely instrument (e.g., “shovel” for “digging a hole”). In some sentences an explicit instrument is presented. In others the instrument remains implicit. Instrument cue effectiveness is then examined in a subsequent cued recall task. It is concluded that recall cue effectiveness is not a reliable measure of encoding in comprehension. It is further concluded, on the basis of instrument recall, that highly probable implicit instruments are not routinely inferred in comprehension.