Dl. Long et Jl. Chong, Comprehension skill and global coherence: A paradoxical picture of poor comprehenders' abilities, J EXP PSY L, 27(6), 2001, pp. 1424-1429
Citations number
20
Categorie Soggetti
Psycology
Journal title
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY-LEARNING MEMORY AND COGNITION
The authors investigated good and poor comprehenders',maintenance of global
coherence during reading. Participants read stories in which a character's
action was consistent or inconsistent with a description of the character
presented earlier in the story. In Experiment 1, the description and action
were adjacent in the text (local coherence) or were separated by interveni
ng text (global coherence). Both groups of comprehenders read inconsistent
actions more slowly than consistent actions in the local coherence conditio
n, but only good comprehenders showed die reading time difference in the gl
obal coherence condition. In Experiment 2, the authors disconfirmed the hyp
othesis that poor comprehenders fail to maintain global coherence because t
hey fail to activate prior text information. Thus, the results present a pa
radoxical picture in which poor readers activate relevant knowledge during
reading but fail to integrate it into their developing representation.