“…As the "core of the understanding process" (Schank, 1976, p. 168), inferential processing plays an essential and pivotal role in successful comprehension during text reading (Virtue et al, 2006;Wang et al, 2021). Throughout the past few decades, inferential processing during discourse reading has been a major concern to researchers across disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience (e.g., Cohn, 2014;Perfetti & Stafura, 2013;Kim, 2014;Xu et al, 2020;Feng et al, 2021).…”