Expository Text Comprehension: Prior Knowledge and Working Memory

Saux, Gastón, Burin, Débora, Irrazabal, Natalia
2012 Revista Argentina de Ciencias del Comportamiento  
This paper examines the comprehension of general and disciplinary expository texts as a function of previous domain-specific knowledge, and working memory capacity. Novices or experts in psychology topics read a general expository text and a disciplinary expository text. Two measures of comprehension were collected: the production of a summary, and the response to multiple-choice questions. Working memory capacity was measured with the Reading Span Task. Results indicated better performance
more » ... experts on the disciplinary text. No differences were found on the general text, or as a function of working memory, except for expert readers in disciplinary texts. These results support the hypothesis that previous domain-specific knowledge is a key factor in differences in text comprehension, in comparison with the working memory capacity hypothesis.
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