Contextually relevant aspects of meaning

A series of six experiments investigated whether inferences about contextually relevant aspects of meaning were encoded into memory during reading. In all the experiments, subjects studied short paragraphs. Then, test sentences were presented that expressed relevant aspects of meaning that had not been explicitly stated in the paragraphs. For example, for a paragraph about searching for the correct color to paint a picture of a tomato, a relevant aspect of meaning would be that tomatoes are red. The test sentences were presented either immediately following the relevant paragraph or after a delay. With immediate testing, it was argued that the facilitation obtained in verification latency could result from processes occurring either when the context was read or when the test sentence was verified. With delayed testing, evidence was found to support the hypothesis that contextually relevant aspects of meaning are incorporated into the memory representation of the paragraph, but such evidence was obtained only when the retrieval environment encouraged the use of newly learned information in the decision process on the test sentence.