Abstract

This study was conducted to investigate the individual differences(reading span differences) in instrument inference by using two different tasks. Lexical decision task was used in Experiment 1 whereas picture naming task was used in Experiment 2. The results of Experiment 1 indicated that high span readers generated instrument inference on-line while low span readers did not. However, the results of Experiment 2 indicated that both low and high span readers generated instrument inference on-line. It is suggested that picture naming task is so sensitive to the perceptual inferential processing that the generation of instrument inference of low span readers could be detected, whereas lexical decision task is sensitive only to the verbal inference. It is also discussed that reading span may reflect the processing efficiency in the phonological loop system of working memory.