INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN WORKING MEMORY CAPACITY AND THE RECALL OF PREDICTED ELEMENTS IN THE TEXT Leda

This study investigates the relationship between reading ability, working memory capacity, and readers' use and recall of the mechanism of prediction. Reading ability was measured by free recall and by comprehension questions, and working memory capacity was assessed by the Reading Span Test (Daneman and Carpenter, 1980). Twelve Brazilian speakers of Portuguese read texts containing the mechanism of prediction and were asked to verbalize their thoughts while reading. An analysis of the verbal protocols indicates that better and weaker readers, also high and low span respectively, showed a different behavior when recalling the information from the texts. Better readers tended to recall both the predictive signal and all the predicted elements correctly and could also recall more propositions from each text. Weaker readers, on the other hand, tended to simply disregard the predictive signal and recall only some of the predicted elements, and to recall less information than the better readers. (Contains 31 references and 2 tables.) (Author/KFT) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN WORKING MEMORY CAPACITY AND THE RECALL OF PREDICTED ELEMENTS IN THE TEXT Leda Maria Braga Tomitch Universidade Federal de Santa CatarinaBrazil ABSTRACT U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office of Educational Research and Improvement EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) StThis document has been reproduced as received from the person or organization originating it. Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality.U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office of Educational Research and Improvement EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) StThis document has been reproduced as received from the person or organization originating it. Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality. Points of view or opinions stated in this document do not necessarily represent official OERI position or policy. This study investigates the relationship between reading ability, working memory capacity, and readers' use and recall of the mechanism of Prediction. Reading ability was measured by free recall and by comprehension questions, and working memory capacity was assessed by the Reading Span Test (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980). Twelve Brazilian speakers of Portuguese read texts containing the mechanism of Prediction and were asked to verbalize their thoughts while reading. An analysis of the verbal protocols indicates that better and weaker readers, also high and low span respectively, showed a different behavior when recalling the information from the texts. Better readers tended to recall both the predictive signal and all the predicted elements correctly, and could also recall more propositions from each text. Weaker readers, on the other hand, tended to simply disregard the predictive signal and recall only some of the predicted elements, and to recall less information than better readers. INTRODUCTION PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) 1 One of the most influential studies in the area of working memory capacity was that by Daneman and Carpenter (1980). Much of the research in this area has evolved from Daneman and Carpenter's work and has used, with little modifications, their Reading Span Test as a measure of working memory capacity, investigating how it correlates with a number of other cognitive skills including reading comprehension. Significant correlations have been obtained its.0 between the Reading Span Test and standardized measures of reading comprehension ability such 2 BEST COPY AVAILABLE --t L4as the Verbal Scholastic Aptitude TestVSAT (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980; Turner & Engle, 1989) and the Nelson-Denny reading test (Masson & Miller, 1983; Baddeley, Logie, NimmoSmith & Brereton, 1985; Turner & Engle, 1989). Reading Span has also been shown to correlate to a fairly great extent with a number of specific aspects of reading comprehension ability such as recalling information (Tomitch, 1996), answering comprehension questions (Tomitch, 1996), making inferences (Masson & Miller, 1983; Daneman & Green, 1986; Whitney, Ritchie & Clark, 1991; and Singer, Andrusiak, Reisdorf & Black, 1992), processing complex syntactic structures (King & Just, 1991; and MacDonald, Just & Carpenter, 1992) and resolving lexical ambiguities (Daneman & Carpenter, 1983; and Miyake, Just & Carpenter, 1994). The present study is an expansion on Tomitch (1996) and has as its main objective to investigate the relationship between reading ability, working memory capacity, and readers' use and recall of the text organizational aspect of Prediction (Tadros, 1985). Prediction, as described by Tadros, involves a pair with two members: the predictive member and the predicted member. The predictive member carries signals which imply that a Prediction has been set up (`There are two types of .) and the predicted member contains the realization of that Prediction (One type The other type.). The main assumption in the present study is that once the better reader spots a predictive signal s/he knows what kind of incoming information s/he should look for to fulfil the tacit commitment of the writer, thus putting less burden on working memory and being able to construct a more solid framework of the text's content which will help subsequent retrieval of that information. The basis for this assumption comes from the following findings in text structure research: first, better readers are more capable of identifying the superordinate information in a text and of forming hierarchical clusters (van Dijk, 1980; Meyer, Brandt & Bluth, 1980; McGee, 1982). In a study about structural awareness of good and poor ninth-grade readers, Meyer et al (1980) found