Inference processing in discourse comprehension

Discourse understanding has been systematically studied within the framework of modern cognitive psychology for fewer than forty years. The inferences that accompany discourse comprehension have been a central focus of this field. One reason for this is that virtually every aspect of language comprehension is inferential. This article describes inferential phenomena that involve augmenting explicitly stated discourse ideas with implied concepts and relations. The term “discourse” refers to coherent messages in either of these modalities. In practice, however, a majority of the research has scrutinised reading comprehension. It is also noted that researchers have inspected numerous genres of discourse, including narratives, expositions, recipes, instruction lists, and poetry. The article first discusses the construction-integration model of inference processing in discourse comprehension, coherence and its impact on inference processing, and elaborative inferences.