THE RELATION OF TEXT STRUCTURE TO CONTEXT PROCESSING DURING READING

Following Levy's (1983) familiarization and proofreading paradigm, we investigated the effect of familiarization, type of reading unit, and content type on text processing. Young adults (N = 120) were asked to process storied and normal Hindi passages presented in Devanagari scri pt, as well as scrambled passages that contained errors that were eith er normally spaced or not spaced at all. Better processing and short-t erm retention were evident when passages retained interword spaces tha n when interword spaces were omitted. Text processing required more ti me under the familiarization condition and informed error detection in spaced passages. The processing speed decreased from storied, to scra mbled, to normal passages. Thus, the contextual inducement of familiar ization and passage structure implies that conceptually driven process es are the preferred units of processing in reading and word meaning.