How hypertext reading sequences affect understanding of causal and temporal relations in story comprehension

Abstract

The goal of this study is to examine the comprehension of global causal and temporal relations between events that are represented in single hypertext documents. In two experiments we examined how reading sequences of hypertext nodes affects the establishment of event relations and how this process can be supported by advanced organizers that provide either temporal or causal pre-information. In the first experiment we could show that discourse structure affected recall of temporal event sequences only when causal relations were absent. In a second experiment, the comprehension of either temporal or causal relations was facilitated by providing different types of pre-information (advanced organizer). Temporal pre-information facilitated recall of temporal event sequences without underlying causal relations. In contrast, causal pre-information facilitated recall of temporal event sequences with causal relations. The results demonstrate that readers use causal information to construct temporal event sequences.