Drawing inferences from concrete and abstract sentences

A series of three studies employed a sentence verification task with pairs of concrete or abstract sentences. Each test sentence was either a paraphrase or an inference from its corresponding stimulus sentence. The results showed that concrete sentences are verified significantly faster than abstract sentences for both explicit (paraphrase) and implicit (inference) test items, and that paraphrases were verified more rapidly than inferences for both concrete and abstract sentences. There was no reliable interaction between the main effects of explicitness and imageability. These results appear to be consistent across instructional conditions, since they were replicated in Experiment 1 (with an imagery orienting task), Experiment 2 (with a verbal orienting task), and Experiment 3 (which compared both types of tasks). It was concluded that imageability facilitates processing speed for both explicit and implicit aspects of meaning to approximately the same degree.

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