摘要是形成文本表徵的重要基礎（Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978）。讀者若能形成理想的文章摘要，亦即將文章的內容形成「鉅觀結構」（Kintsch, 1998）。讀者依照三個「鉅觀規則」：刪除（deletion）、概括（generalization）和建構（construction）來形成文章的鉅觀結構（van Dijk,1980）。讀者在摘要的歷程中，必須進行文本局部及整體連貫性的推論，「刪除」規則需要讀者將文本與其背景知識整合，以推論文章訊息或概念的重要性，決定這些訊息是否應該保留在摘要中。「概括化」和「建構」兩個規則，需要將相似或相同位階的概念加以整合，以提取上位概念，進而建構出能涵蓋下位概念的「主題句」。本研究將探討摘要的推論歷程進行分析，深入探討讀者在形成摘要時，「刪除」、「概括」和「建構」推論所扮演的角色。研究一的目的是比較國小學童摘要「刪除」、「概括化」和「建構」三種推論能力的發展。我們將四至六年級國小學童依其識字、閱讀能力進行配對，並透過實驗材料的操弄，比較國小學童在摘要歷程中刪除、概括化和建構三種推論發展差異。結果發現「概括化」和「建構」能力是影響摘要表現的重要因素。研究二的目的是探討概括化能力的發展差異以及對學童摘要表現上的影響。分別測量四年級和六年級學童的概括化能力，進而分析概括化能力與閱讀理解對說明文摘要表現之影響。結果發現概括化推論能力有發展上的差異，概括化能力可以有效地預測四年級學童之摘要表現。

The ability of summarization is an important indicator of textbase understanding. Readers who are able to write an ideal summary of text can build up the macrostructure of text and extract the literal meaning from the text (Kintsch, 1998). A lot of local and global inferences were needed for macrostructure. Readers employ the three macro-rules during reading: First, readers delete both redundant and trivial information from the text. In order to do so, readers read text elements sequentially and decide the importance for each element on inclusion or deletion by their background knowledge. After deletion procedure, readers generalize related or similar concepts/sentences and construct superoridinate terms as substitutes. In this paper, two studies were presented to show how these inferences affected the construction of summary. In the first study, the purpose was to investigate the development of there types of inferences during summarization (i.e., deletion, generalization and construction). Fifty-three fourth graders, 55 fifth graders and 56 sixth graders were recruited from an elementary school in Chia-Yi City. Three versions of experimental texts, which were created to examine deletion, generalization, and construction inference-making abilities respectively, were given to participants for writing 60-words summaries. There was a significant developmental difference between fourth and sixth graders on the performance of generalization. Then, we selected low-ability participants from the 6th grade level and matched their word-recognition and reading-comprehension scores with participants on 4th grade. The result showed that there was a reliable difference between the low-ability group and the comprehension-match group. In the second study, the purpose was to examine how generalization inference affected children's summarization. Sixty-five fourth graders and 53 sixth graders were recruited from an elementary school in Yunlin County. All participants were administered the Reading Comprehension growth Test, the generalization test, and the expository summarization assessment. The results showed that there was significant developmental difference on the performance of generalization inference. In addition, the generalization inference reliably predicted the performance of summarization for the fourth graders.