The marker is less-skilled comprehenders' poorer memory for recently comprehended information, regardless of whether they are reading, listening, or viewing picture stories. Consider the consequence of a less efficient suppression mechanism. Information that is less relevant or even inappropriate to the structure being developed would remain activated. Because this irrelevant information cannot be mapped onto a developing structure, its activation lays the foundation for a new substructure. So, one consequence of an inefficient suppression mechanism is the tendency to develop too many substructures.
Subjects read a sentence, and then they read a test word.
Their task was to verify whether the test word fit the context of the sentence they just read. On some trials, the last word of the sentence was a homonym, for example, The man dug with the spade , and the test word was related to the contextually inappropriate meaning of the homonym, for example, ACE . We compared how rapidly subjects rejected a test word like ACE with how rapidly they rejected the same test word after reading the sentence with the last word replaced by an unambiguous word, for example, The man dug with the shovel . But after a 750 ms delay, more-skilled comprehenders no longer experienced any interference. We concluded that less-skilled comprehenders were less able to quickly suppress the inappropriate meanings.