The Impact of Semantic and Causal Relatedness and Reading Skill on Standards of Coherence

The Relation of Knowledge-Text Integration Processes and Reading Comprehension in 7th- to 12th-Grade Students

“…However, the current findings are consistent with off-line studies of knowledge-based inference making and with think aloud studies showing that less skilled comprehenders are less likely to make inferences to maintain causal coherence than their more skilled peers and that they are less sensitive to causal relations in text (reviewed in Cain & Oakhill, 2007; Magliano & Millis, 2003; Todaro et al, 2010). Disparities in findings across studies could be related to difficulties in reliably discerning reading time differences between conditions in small samples and/or to differences in materials between studies, that is, comparing causal versus noncausal sequences in the ASD studies versus comparing stronger and weaker causal sequences in the current study.…”

“…Less skilled comprehenders did not show a difference in reading times between causal and temporal sequences, and they also read sentences more slowly than more skilled comprehenders. If poor comprehenders are less sensitive to causal relatedness in text (Todaro et al, 2010), causal relations in text may not serve as sufficiently strong cues to retrieve knowledge to make what are considered to be routine memory-based inferences (Halldorson & Singer, 2002; van den Broek et al, 2005). Alternatively, slower reading times in the temporal condition for more skilled comprehenders could reflect more time-consuming processes in which they engage to establish a relation between sentences across larger causal distances (Myers et al, 1987).…”

“…Among college students, those who are better comprehenders are more likely than their less skilled peers to base their standards of coherence on causal relatedness than semantic relatedness between sentences (Todaro, Millis, & Dandotkar, 2010). Studies using think-aloud procedures with adults and children find that less skilled comprehenders make fewer explanatory or causal connections required for maintaining coherence than do more skilled comprehenders (e.g., Laing & Kamhi, 2003; Magliano & Millis, 2003) and that the greater the distance in the text across which two sentences need to be integrated to maintain coherence particularly affects younger children (van den Broek, 1989) and less skilled comprehenders (Cain, Oakhill, & Lemon, 2004; Magliano & Millis, 2003).…”

Comprehension and Processing of Paired Sentences in Second Language Reading: A Comparison of Causal and Semantic Relatedness

“…In addition, this experiment provided new evidence that semantic relatedness between sentences also influences L2 text memory. However, this effect was only prominent for learners whose L2 reading proficiency level is higher than the beginner's level, which was opposite the pattern found in some previous studies (Nahatame, ; Todaro et al., ). Note that Experiment 1 was conducted with learners at beginning to low intermediate levels of English.…”

“…On the contrary, Todaro et al. () found that the high semantic relatedness caused longer reading times of less causally related text for skilled L1 readers, suggesting that those readers engage in a time‐consuming process, such as the generation of a coherence‐preserving inference based on semantic associates. However, this was not likely the case for the L2 readers in the present study, given the lack of the semantic relatedness effect for the processing of less causally related text.…”