  We describe effects of matter-wave interference of spinor states in the
$^{87}$Rb Bose-Einstein condensate. The components of the F=2 manifold are
populated by forced Majorana transitions and then fall freely due to gravity in
an applied magnetic field. Weak inhomogeneities of the magnetic field, present
in the experiment, impose relative velocities onto different $m_F$ components,
which show up as interference patterns upon measurement of atomic density
distributions with a Stern-Gerlach imaging method. We show that interference
effects may appear in experiments even if gradients of the magnetic field
components are eliminated but higher order inhomogeneity is present and the
duration of the interaction is long enough. In particular, we show that the
resulting matter-wave interference patterns can mimic spontaneous pattern
formation in the quantum gas.
