Abstract: When readers experience narratives,their expectations about the likelihood of narrative events are informed by two types of propensity.Reality-predictive inferences incorporate real-world constraints involving,for example,time and space and so on;preference-predictive inferences incorporate concerns about outcomes that emerge from the plot.The goal of this article was to explore the role of these two types of inferences in narrative comprehension.Participants read stories in which the scenario provided a biasing context and a preference statement.The experiments assessed participants reading times for statement describing the state of events following different scenarios.Experiment 1 demonstrated that readers could immediately encode both reality-predictive and preference-predictive inferences in text reading.In Experiment 2,readers were grouped according to their scores of EPQ.Results showed that for the affectivity oriented readers the activation of preference-predictive inference were stronger than that of reality-predictive inference and vice versa for the non-affectivity oriented readers.

Key words: predictive inference, reality-predictive inferences, preference-predictive inferences, affectivity oriented, non-affect ivity oriented