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Published on: November 30, 2018
Resolution of activated background information in text comprehension
Ruiming Wang1, Lei Mo, Xianyou He
1South China Normal University, Guangzhou.
Summary
This study on text comprehension found that readers integrate background information, even if initially inconsistent, into a unified understanding. This memory-based process aids coherence and information updating during reading.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Reading Comprehension Research
Background:
- Investigating how readers resolve activated background information during text processing.
- Examining the interplay between memory-based and here-and-now views of comprehension.
Purpose of the Study:
- To explore the resolution of activated background information in Chinese readers.
- To test whether memory-based processing generalizes to Chinese readers.
- To determine how updated information is represented during ongoing reading.
Main Methods:
- Experiment 1: Participants read passages with consistent or qualified elaborations, followed by two target sentences.
- Experiment 2: Modified Experiment 1 by shifting the target sentence position to assess delay effects.
- Reading times for target sentences were measured to infer processing difficulty.
Main Results:
- Experiment 1 showed longer reading times for the first target sentence in qualified elaborations, supporting the memory-based view.
- Crucially, reading times for the second target sentence did not differ, indicating unified information processing.
- Experiment 2 confirmed these findings, ruling out delay effects.
Conclusions:
- Activated background information is updated and integrated into a unified representation, supporting the memory-based view of comprehension.
- This unified information is reactivated during reading, maintaining text coherence.
- The findings generalize the memory-based processing model to Chinese readers.
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