Investigating Individual Differences in General Comprehension Skill: The Role ofSuppression and Enhancement

摘要

Investigation into whether the cognitive mechanism of suppression underliesdifferences in adult comprehensions skills are reported. Less-skilled comprehenders less-efficiently reject the inappropriate meaning of ambiguous words (e.g., the playing card vs garden tool meaning of spade), the incorrect forms of homophones (e.g., patients vs patience), the highly-typical-but-absent members of scenes (e.g., tractor in a farm scene), and words superimposed on pictures of pictures surrounding words. however, less-skilled comprehenders are not less cognizant of what is contexually appropriate, in fact, they benefit from a biasing context just as much (and perhaps more) as more-skilled comprehenders do. So, comprehenders do no have difficulty enhancing contexually appropriate information. Instead, it is suggested that less-skilled comprehenders suffer from less-efficient suppression mechanism, which we conclude is an important component of general comprehension skill. (sdw)