ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a distinction between factual and inferential questions to examine how the causes and consequences of characters' actions are understood. Causal inferences are an essential component of text comprehension processes. Texts may be decomposed into chains of causally connected actions, physical states, and mental states. Using a taxonomy of possible causal events, the event chain underlying the text is recovered and the inferred causal links are identified. Six types of complex sentences are recognized: sentences containing infinitive phrases, gerundive phrases, noun phrase complements, relative clauses, participal adjectives, and subordinate clauses. In order to investigate the role of causal inferences in text comprehension and question answering, the chapter examines sentence reading times and question-answering latencies. Target sentences were read more rapidly in the easy passages designed for tenth-grade readers than in the hard passages designed for college-level readers.
