Cognitive Processing in Oral and Silent Reading Comprehension

Abstract

THE RELATION between oral and silent reading comprehension was examined in an information-processing framework. In this framework, comprehension involves construction of and access to a hierarchical knowledge structure by the reader. Reading rates and comprehension measures that probed recognition of various levels of text structure were collected for passages read orally and silently by 16 college students. Oral reading rates were slower than silent reading rates. More encompassing or higher level representations were verified more slowly than lexical and lower level text representations. Differences due to reading mode were found only for lowand high-level propositions that occurred in the text explicitly; for these, silent reading of the text led to slower verification responses than oral reading. The results suggest that memory traces of text microstructure created in (slower) oral reading are accessed faster during memory-based comprehension tasks than traces established by faster processes that occur during silent reading.