Comprehension skill and global coherence: a paradoxical picture of poor comprehenders' abilities

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 intervening text (global coherence). Both groups of comprehenders read inconsistent actions more slowly than consistent actions in the local coherence condition, but only good comprehenders showed the reading time difference in the global coherence condition. In Experiment 2, the authors disconfirmed the hypothesis that poor comprehenders fail to maintain global coherence because they fail to activate prior text information. Thus, the results present a paradoxical picture in which poor readers activate relevant knowledge during reading but fail to integrate it into their developing representation.