Processing and Memory of Central and Peripheral Ideas in Reading Comprehension by Poor Comprehenders

This study was designed to examine the ability of poor comprehenders to identify, attend, and remember central and peripheral ideas during and after reading. To address these goals, good and poor comprehenders, matched on reading (word decoding) skills and non-verbal intelligence, read three expository texts, while their eye-movements were monitored during reading. Latencies and frequency of (re)reading central and peripheral ideas were measured to assess attention allocation during reading. After reading the three texts, participants were asked to recall, recognize, and rate the centrality level of text ideas, in order to assess the extent to which they store, retrieve and identify central and peripheral ideas, respectively. Findings indicated that poor comprehenders identified, (re)read and recognized central (as compared to peripheral) ideas to the same extent as good comprehenders, whereas their recall of central ideas was significantly lower than good comprehenders. This specific retrieval deficit is further illuminated in the context of their poor integration skills.