The Role of Context in Accessing Antecedents in Text

Five experiments were conducted to examine the type of information in the representation of a passage that may be activated during a search for antecedent information. Experiment 1 demonstrated that, with supporting context, concepts not even present in the representation of a passage become active during an antecedent search. Experiment 2 confirmed that the activation of these concepts occurred during reinstatement. Experiment 3 showed that if the activation of these concepts is sufficiently high, readers may infer and incorrectly retrieve these concepts instead of the correct antecedent. Experiments 4 and 5 confirmed that inferencing of these concepts occurred during retrieval and not during initial reading of the passage. It is proposed that antecedent retrieval is a strategic process in which readers can either find and retrieve an antecedent or generate a likely candidate on the basis of information activated during the search.