Development of inferences over elementary-school grades: I. Recall and association of implicit words

Abstract

Students in the second through the sixth grades were read a series of very short (one-sentence) “stories” by teachers in regular classroom settings. In each sentence, there was one clearly implied word. The students were then asked to write, cued by the title of each “story,” one word that they had heard and one word that they had not heard but had thought of (and presumably inferred). A reliable increment over grades occurred in the number of implied words that were reported as thought of, with a sharp increment from the second to the third grades; and there was also a more regular increment over grades in the number of implied words that were used as associates to cues in a subsequent test. © 1991, Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.