The Effects of Coherence Explicitness on College Readers' Prose Comprehension

Abstract

This study was designed to investigate the comparative effects of the ex-plicitness of two types of intersentential coherence relations on college students' comprehension. The explicitness of argument repetitions (AR) and connective concepts (CC) was varied across forms of an experimental passage resulting in the following four versions: explicit AR/implicit CC, explicit CC/implicit AR, both explicit, both implicit. College students were randomly assigned to one of the four versions. They silently read the passage and then immediately wrote their recall protocols. The results indicated that there were no significant differences among the groups at either the micro or macro levels in terms of reading times, amount recalled, or reading time/amount recalled ratios. There were, however, significant differences among the variances in the four groups. These results are discussed in terms of processing theories and in terms of possible individual difference variables.