IDENTIFICATION OF WRITTEN DISCOURSE TOPICS BY STRUCTURE COHERENCE ANDANALOGY STRATEGIES - GENERAL-ASPECTS AND INDIVIDUAL-DIFFERENCES

Categorically structured informative texts exhibit their discourse-top ic in the beginning, When asked what the text is about, the skilled re ader would deeply process the first proposition and skim through the r est for disconfirmation. S/he will, therefore, perform poorly on incoh erent texts whose discourse-topic is displaced. Gifted and normal high -school students from a high socioeconomic neighborhood correctly iden tified more topics in coherent than in incoherent texts (Experiment 1) . Low socioeconomic status subjects performed more poorly than the hig h socioeconomic status subjects on coherent texts, but better on incoh erent texts (Experiment 2). Analogy improved performance on coherent t exts among low socioeconomic status subjects, who came from academic c lasses, but did not affect performance on incoherent texts, Experiment 3 studied discourse-topic identification of schematically organized t exts by low socioeconomic status subjects, and found that analogies im paired it. The results are discussed in terms of the distinction betwe en general comprehension and text-specific strategies.