Abstract: Predictive inference has been studied by many researchers, yet still many problems exist. Two factors that may influence the process of predictive inference were examined. The first was reading spans of the subjects. SentenceWord method has been used to identify the reader's reading span into three grades-high, middle and low reading span. The second factor was changes of reading focus on different events described in the same paragraph. This factor has three levels, same event, different event, and environment description. Naming time was measured under different conditions when the subjects read Chinese paragraphs. Each paragraph contained of four sentences. The results indicated that naming times of the readers with different reading spans were significantly different. The higher the reading span, the shorter the naming time. Those readers who had higher reading spans were more sensitive to the context. They seemed to obtain less predictive amount for each item in their long term memory, but spread predicting effects to more items. It was likely that predictive inference could maintain even when current reading focus had moved to another event. From these results, it was suggested that predictive inference may exist longer than what had been considered in the past. A dynamic process for allocating cognitive resources was proposed.

Key words: Predictive inference, Working memory, Reading focus