ABSTRACT
There is an important distinction between two sorts of inference that occur in daily life. On the one hand, implicit inferences are rapid, effortless, and usually outside conscious awareness; they play a crucial role in the comprehension of discourse. This chapter reports some experimental results showing that children are often poor at making such inferences, and that one difference between good readers and bad readers is precisely the ability to make such inferences. On the other hand, explicit inferences are made in answering questions and solving problems. They can be genuinely deductive, unlike implicit inferences that tend to be plausible conjectures that may subsequently be discounted.
