Verbal Ability and Prior Knowledge

Abstract

This study examined the relative contributions of both verbal ability and prior knowledge to comprehension and memory for a televised movie about the Underground Railroad in both immediate and delayed retrieval conditions. Persons with both high levels of verbal ability and average to high levels of prior knowledge performed best on the comprehension measure, and those with low levels of verbal ability and prior knowledge had the lowest performance. For immediate comprehension, verbal ability was the best predictor of performance, whereas for the delay condition, prior knowledge was the best predictor of comprehension. This finding suggests that while both factors aid in the comprehension process, they do so in a different way. Discussion focuses on the idea that verbal ability may provide automaticity of processing, releasing capacity in working memory for encoding, whereas prior knowledge provides schemes for retrieval cues that are critical for accessing memory after a delay.