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Numerous methods for assessing inferencing ability have been developed, but most measure an individual’s ability to make inferences while reading a text which was constructed

around a single inference generated or written to evoke a specific set of inferences (Barth et al., 2015; Bos et al., 2016; Cain et al., 2001; Cromley & Azevedo, 2007; Singer et al., 1992; Tarchi, 2015). For example, researchers will construct a narrative which is missing a key event which is inferable from the context of the missing event. Readers would then be tasked with filling in this information is some way. Although this type of inferencing measure can be used to a great effect in identifying individual readers’ inferencing ability or difficulty, these measures are less

applicable to identifying where and when inferencing occurs during authentic text reading, or if inferencing contributes to successful comprehension of authentic texts. Some methods have been previously employed to understand inferencing during naturalistic reading including lexical processing measures (Potts et al., 1988), sentence processing measures (McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992), and elicitations (gap-filling targeting inferred information; Cain et al., 2001). Each of these methodologies has been employed to isolate inference generation during successful reading in a first language (L1), but this paradigm has been less utilized in L2 reading contexts.

In the L2 context, studies on inferencing ability have primarily examined lexical

inferencing, or the ability to infer meanings of new words. A few studies have examined causal inferences at the text level in L2 readers. These studies have utilized short texts designed to induce inference generation, modified texts with lower and higher coherence, and self-reported inferencing strategy use to understand L2 readers’ use of inferencing. Lake (2014) utilized short two-sentence texts which required an inference to maintain the coherence of the sentences. The inference either bridged the two sentences, or made a forward prediction based on the

combination of the information in both sentences. Each sentence pair was followed by a true or false question which required the inferred knowledge to respond to. Lake’s (2014) study found that L2 readers respond significantly faster to questions which required a bridging inference,

indicating inference making is important to L2 reading comprehension at least in terms of local coherence. However, the study did not look at inference generation during reading of longer texts. Shimizu (2009) examined bridging inferencing in a similar two-sentence coherence paradigm study. Shimizu had English learners read causally related pairs of sentences with different levels of direct causality and had them immediately recall as much as they could from the two sentences. The study found that L2 English readers with lower proficiency exhibited slower recall as the coherence of the sentence pairs required more indirect bridging. Horiba (1996) examined inferencing during the processing of larger texts, using modified high-

coherence and low-coherence texts. The hypothesis is that the low-coherence texts would require more reader-responsible inferencing and would thus slow reading. However, L2 readers were not found to significantly differ in processing speed of either text type, which is the case for L1 readers. This indicates that L2 readers may utilize other compensatory mechanisms to process both high- and low-coherence texts, and that this approach does not capture L2 inferencing during reading. Feller and colleagues (2020) took a different approach to examining inferencing in multilingual readers. Their study involved surveying multilingual readers regarding self- perceptions of reading strategies. They found that higher-proficiency readers reported more activation of bridging strategies. Each of these studies measured inferencing ability using a discrete assessment or survey inference targeting inference-making ability, but no studies on L2 or multilingual readers have thus far attempted to measure inference generation as it occurred during the reading of unmodified, authentic texts, and inference generation has not been compared empirically to reading comprehension performance on tasks reflective of real-world reading assessment.

One paradigm that can be applied to inference generation during reading comprehension research involves various methods of evaluating reaction times to readers judgments of

sentences. Judgements of sentences related to a previously read text, such as true/false decisions or new/old information, have been employed in various ways to examine specifically inferencing in previous research. One strand of such research involves using extended narrative texts,

followed by sentences either related or unrelated to a character’s goal or situation in the text (Ahmed et al., 2016; Barth et al., 2015; Graesser et al., 1994; McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992; Pike et al., 2010). The expectation is that making necessary inferences while reading the text primes the reader’s response to the test sentences. This approach to measuring inferences has been useful with narrative texts and using inferencing to assess comprehension, but this methodology has not been used as frequently with expository texts or when inferencing is not the direct target of measurement. Another strand of sentence judgment tasks used to measure inferencing uses very short priming texts, only one or two sentences long, followed by a test item which is either primed by the previous text or not, but the truth of which is independent of the previous text (Ahmed et al., 2016; Graesser et al., 1994; Singer et al., 1992). Research using this approach has found that inferring causal, logical connections and activating background knowledge are part of comprehension of short passages, but this measure of inference-generation has not been applied as frequently to the comprehension longer priming texts.