Two experiments, theoretically motivated by the construction-integration model of text comprehension ( W. Kintsch, 1988), investigated the role of text coherence in the comprehension of science texts. In Experiment 1, junior high school students' comprehension of one of three versions of a biology text was examined via free recall, written questions, and a key-word sorting task. This study demonstrates advantages for globally coherent text and for more explanatory text. In Experiment 2, interactions among local and global text coherence, readers' background knowledge, and levels of understanding were examined. Using the same methods as in Experiment 1, we examined students' comprehension of one of four versions of a text, orthogonally varying local and global coherence. We found that readers who know little about the domain of the text benefit from a coherent text, whereas high-knowledge readers benefit from a minimally coherent text. We argue that the poorly written text forces the knowledgeable readers to engage in compensatory processing to infer unstated relations in the text. These findings, however, depended on the level of understanding, text base or situational, being measured by the three comprehension tasks. Whereas the free-recall measure and text-based questions primarily tapped readers' superficial understanding of the text, the inference questions, problem-solving questions, and sorting task relied on a situational understanding of the text. This study provides evidence that the rewards to be gained from active processing are primarily at the level of the situation model rather than at the superficial level of text-base understanding.

In 3 experiments, the authors examined the role of knowledge activation in the suppression of contextually irrelevant meanings for ambiguous homographs. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants with greater baseball knowledge, regardless of reading skill, more quickly suppressed the irrelevant meaning of ambiguous words in baseball-related, but not general-topic, sentences. Experiment 3 demonstrated that participants with greater general knowledge, regardless of reading skill, more quickly suppressed the irrelevant meaning of the ambiguous words in general-topic sentences. As predicted by D. S. McNamara’s (1997) knowledge-based account of suppression, ambiguity effects are influenced by greater activation of knowledge related to the intended meaning of the homograph. These results challenge inhibition (e.g., M. A. Gernsbacher, K. R. Varner, & M. Faust, 1990) as the sole mechanism responsible for the suppression of irrelevant information. Text and discourse present numerous challenges for the comprehender. One facet of communication that is particularly challenging is the resolution of lexical ambiguity. For example, homographs such as bug, match, draft, and mold have multiple meanings, and when these homographs are encountered, the comprehender

This study applies a material appropriate processing (MAP) perspective to the study of embedded questions in expository audiovisual and text presentations. The MAP approach postulates that expository material naturally elicits more processing of details than relationships; therefore, encoding strategies that elicit processing not spontaneously elicited by the material will particularly benefit memory. I predicted that participants viewing a video or reading a passage with no embedded questions should remember more detail than relational information, and embedding relational questions should significantly enhance recall of relational information. Previous literature on embedded questions has demonstrated that questions embedded throughout text typically enhance memory for targeted information and sometimes for similar types of nontargeted information. Consequently, I anticipated that detail questions might enhance recall of targeted details but not of nontargeted ones. I also explored the effect of pacing on recall. Some researchers have found that quickly changing camera angles comprehension; others contend that varying angles increases engagement. I investigated pacing effects by presenting the video with either varying camera angles or a single angle. Embedding detail or relational questions in a video lecture shown from single or multiple camera angles increased memory for the targeted information. Recall of the some types of nontargeted information also showed some enhancement.

In this paper we tested a computer-based procedure for assessing very concise summaries (50 words) using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) combined with four expert human judgments and two types of text (narrative and expository). LSA was used to estimate semantic similarity using six different

ABSTRACT. Moral text processing was used as an ecologically valid method for assessing implicit and explicit moral understanding and development. The authors tested undergraduates, seminarians, and graduate students in political science and philosophy for recall of moral narratives and moral expository texts. Multivariate analyses of covariance using educational experience as an independent variable, age and moral judgment score as covariates, and recall of embedded moral arguments as dependent variables revealed a relation between education and level of moral arguments recalled. Lower-stage moral reasoning was best recalled by undergraduates, whereas higher-stage reasoning was best recalled by graduate students, with seminarians intermediate for both types of text. Moral judgment score was related to recall of the highest-level moral arguments even when age and educational experience were controlled. Moral judgment development appeared to be particularly helpful in recall of expository compared with narrative texts.

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