Writing quality, reading skills, and domain knowledge as factors in text comprehension.

Abstract

Subjects listened to and recalled three passages. Each subject was also given a general reading comprehension test. The passages were presented either in such a way that subjects could use their general knowledge to help understand them, or in such a way that no specific world knowledge seemed applicable. This was achieved by giving the passages a helpful title, versus no title or an unhelpful title. The passages were written in two different versions, preserving their content but varying their style. In one version, the language was as helpful as we could make it in signalling to the listener discourse importance, while in the other version the language was as unhelpful as we could make it while still writing an English text. All three factors--domain knowledge, writing style, and skill--significantly affected reproductive recall, and there were no interactions between these factors. However, while good writing was sufficient to improve the reproduction of the texts, an analysis of the recall elaborations subjects made revealed that the correctness of their elaborations depended strongly on the availability of appropriate domain knowledge. Thus, good writing and domain knowledge are not simply substitutable, but affect comprehension in somewhat different ways.

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