The purpose of this paper was to investigate processes of causal inferences that senior high school students made in reading dilemma narratives. The processes included two parts, on-line and off-line. This study investigated inferences of distant factors for antecedent causal alternatives in texts, based on different concepts of automatic global and local inferences during texts reading between constructionist (Graesser, singer & Trabasso, 1994) and minimalist (McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992). The subjects of the study were 156 senior high school students. They were tested by verbal protocal, cause-decision test, and priming experi-ment. The main methods and results of the study were as follows： 1. A 3(Target Items)x2(Ways of Text Presentation) mixed design was adopted in priming experiment, and ANOVA was used to analyze the data. The results were consistent with the golbal-coherence prediction of constructionist. 2. Chi-square statistic was used to test the results of the cause-deci-sion test. After reading the dilemma narratives, subjects tended to choose more adjacent causal antecedents. And in recaling, they tended to make the easy-available choices, varying with ways of text presentation.