Introduction

In the field of discourse comprehension, it is assumed that the goal of reading is to build a coherent representation. To do that, readers need to recognize the relations between the parts of the discourse and piece them together. Readers may have to fill in the information implied in the text and even elaborate on what is mentioned. All these processes that ‘go beyond’ the information given in the text are called inference (Graesser, Singer & Trabasso, 1994; Schank & Abelson, 1977). In recent decades, numerous studies in the field of discourse comprehension have been conducted around the problem of inference. What inferences occur, when they occur and how they affect the memory of the discourse have been the main issues in this field.

In this chapter, we review studies conducted in Korean on inferences during reading and their effects on memory. While many interesting findings have been reported from the studies conducted in Korean, a large proportion of them are consistent with the findings from studies in English. Inference in discourse comprehension seems to be a process which is less affected by the structure and characteristics of a specific language than are earlier processes such as speech perception, word recognition, or sentence parsing. More abstract and higher levels of cognition, universal to humans, appear to be involved in inference. Still, there are many novel findings that have not been observed in comparable studies in English.