Processing components of college‐level reading comprehension

Abstract

The roles of basic reading processes and prior knowledge to comprehension of expository text were addressed in a study of college readers. According to their performance in the Nelson‐Denny Reading Comprehension Text, 34 college students were divided into groups of above‐average and average readers and had to complete tasks of word and pseudoword vocalization, sentence verification, probe discourse memory, text‐based word recognition and word prediction. Subjects also took a prior knowledge test, read an expository text, and answered comprehension questions that covered explicit and implicit text information. The data indicated that word identification and propositional encoding measures were closely related to individual differences in college‐level reading comprehension ability. Examining the relative contributions of basic reading and prior knowledge to comprehension, it was shown that knowledge played the major role in answering explicit questions, whereas probe discourse memory was relatively more im...