PROCESSING COMPONENTS OF COLLEGE-LEVEL READING-COMPREHENSION

The roles of basic reading processes and prior knowledge to comprehens ion of expository text were addressed in a study of college readers. A ccording to their performance in the Nelson-Denny Reading Comprehensio n Text, 34 college students were divided into groups of above-average and average readers and had to complete tasks of word and pseudoword v ocalization, sentence verification, probe discourse memory, text-based word recognition and word prediction. Subjects also took a prior know ledge test, read an expository text, and answered comprehension questi ons that covered explicit and implicit text information. The data indi cated that word identification and propositional encoding measures wer e closely related to individual differences in college-level reading c omprehension ability. Examining the relative contributions of basic re ading and prior knowledge to comprehension, it was shown that knowledg e played the major role in answering explicit questions, whereas probe discourse memory was relatively more important when the information w as implicit.