Causal relations are the most important properties of a narrative text. The causality between pairs or sequences of events is determined according to four criteria: temporal priority, operativity, necessity, and sufficiency. If all the criteria are met, the events are in strong causal relations. And the degree of causality declines if one of the criteria is not satisfied. Readers are believed to be making causal inferences when processing a narrative text. And evidence shows that when events are not causally connected, coherence breaks occur. It has also been empirically validated that the event that is on the causal chain is recalled better than the one that is out of such a chain. The purpose of the present study is to investigate how the causal relations in an English narrative text influenced EFL learners' inferential process in reading. The results indicated that EFL learners were affected by the factors such as the strength of causality, causal-chain status, and the presence of causal signals when processing a narrative text in English. In the study, sixty-four college freshmen were requested to reconstruct the events that were not temporally sequenced to form a coherent text. The results showed that the majority of the subjects were able to connect the events into causally related sequences, which suggested that EFL learners were drawing causal inferences when processing an English narrative text. Further investigation of the implausible sequences constructed by the subjects showed that the event that had no clear causal-chain status posed more problems for EFL learners than the causal-chain events in the text, corroborating the conclusion reached in previous related studies.
