INFERENCE
المؤلف:
John Field
المصدر:
Psycholinguistics
الجزء والصفحة:
P129
2025-08-31
408
INFERENCE
The process of adding information which is not linguistically present in a text. This is often because a speaker/writer has recognised that certain details and logical connections do not need to be specifically expressed because the recipient will co-operate in supplying them. Several types of inference have been identified:
Logical inference. If a speaker uses the word BACHELOR, it entails that the person referred to is male.
Bridging inference (also termed necessary, backward or integrative inference). To achieve a full understanding of:
a. Bill had been murdered. The knife lay by the body. it is necessary to infer that the body refers to Bill, that the knife was the weapon and that Bill was murdered by stabbing. Only in this way can the reader impose coherence upon the text. The need to make a bridging inference is often signalled by the introduction of a new entity marked for definiteness as if it were ‘given’. Thus, in a above, the article the marks out both body and knife as understood in relation to the text that has preceded them. In many cases, the ‘given’ may be a component of the meaning of an earlier word (perhaps a meronym).
b. He went into the room. The windows were open. (Given the word ROOM, the presence of windows is taken for granted.) Bridging inferences demand extra attentional capacity and therefore slow down processing. It takes longer to process the cola in context c than in d.
c. We checked the picnic supplies. The cola was warm.
d. We got some cola out of the trunk. The cola was warm.
Elaborative inference (also termed forward or predictive inference). The reader uses this type of inference to enrich an interpretation, but it is not essential to understanding and can readily be reversed if later information indicates it is incorrect. Cancellation does not cause disruption to the representation of the text that has been constructed. The distinction between necessary and elaborative inferences is not always a clear one.
Bridging inferences are stored as part of an ongoing mental representation. Listeners often fail to distinguish what they have inferred from what they have heard. Many subjects, presented with the sentence:
e. He slipped on a wet spot and dropped the delicate glass pitcher on the floor, later recalled being told that the pitcher broke. However, there is disagreement as to the extent to which bridging inferences are integrated. A constructivist view holds that all bridging inferences are added to propositional information from the text, whereas a minimalist view argues that only a minimal number is stored in this way.
Elaborative inferences differ from bridging ones in that they do not appear to form part of the mental representation. It has been suggested that, while bridging inferences are made on-line during text processing, elaborative inferences may not be made until later, during recall.
Some apparent elaborative inferences may represent no more than the effects of the automatic process of spreading activation, in which a recent encounter with a word speeds up the recognition of associated ones. The word SHOVEL turned out to be a good cue for recalling the sentence:
f. The grocer dug a hole with a pitchfork
because of its association with the verb DIG.
See also: Given/new, Mental model, Mental representation, Schema theory
Further reading: Brown and Yule (1983); Oakhill and Garnham (1988); Singer (1990, 1994)
الاكثر قراءة في Linguistics fields
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