Strategic processing during comprehension

This study addresses 3 questions: How flexible are readers when reading str ategically? How is strategic processing affected by properties of the text? and Do some strategies lead to better text retention than others? Particip ants read short narratives and thought aloud with an instruction to either explain, predict, associate, or understand. The think-aloud protocols were used to predict sentence reading times for other participants who read sile ntly with the same strategies. The results indicated that readers are capab le of strategically controlling the inferences that they generate. However, strategic control comes at some cost in that it limits the resources devot ed to other inferences. Furthermore, strategic processing is heavily constr ained by a text. Text-based explanations occurred when there was an identif iable causal antecedent in the prior text. Knowledge-based inferences occur red when there were no antecedents and when new characters and objects were introduced. These effects occurred across reading strategies. Reading to e xplain led to better memory, but only when reading silently.