The effect of prior knowledge on understanding from text ... processing... · CREPCO,UniversiteÂdeProvence,Aix-en-Provence,France WalterKintsch ... Afterreadingeachtextthatwaspresented,self-paced,participantsperformed

The effect of prior knowledge on understanding fromtext: Evidence from primed recognition

SteÂ phanie Caillies and Guy DenhieÁ reCREPCO, UniversiteÂ de Provence, Aix-en-Provence, France

Walter KintschInstitute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA

We investigated the relationships that readers with different levels of priorknowledge established between the elements of a procedural text. More specifi-cally, we examined the relationships between the goal, a sequence of actions, andtheir outcome. Our hypothesis was that the main difference between the priorknowledge organisation of beginner, intermediate, and advanced participants canbe described in terms of these relationships. To test this hypothesis, we investi-gated participants’ reading times and used a primed recognition task with the goalas prime and both the outcome and the actions as targets. As we assumed, resultsindicated that the beginner participants did not establish a relationship between thegoal and the outcome when they were distant in the surface structure of the text,whereas the intermediate and advanced participants did. The Construction–Integration model of Kintsch (1998) was used to simulate the recognition resultsand to reproduce the effect of prior knowledge on the retrieval of textual infor-mation.

Several studies have suggested that text comprehension is dependent on priorknowledge. Voss and colleagues provided evidence that domain-specificknowledge influences understanding (Chiesi, Spilich, & Voss, 1979; Means &Voss, 1985; Voss, Vesonder, & Spilich, 1980). They found that high-knowledgereaders recalled more information than low-knowledge readers and concludedthat the former employed their knowledge during reading to construct anorganised representation of the text.

The construction–integration theory of Kintsch (1988, 1998) describes howknowledge is used in comprehension. In this model, readers’ prior knowledge

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, 2002, 14 (2), 267–286

Requests for reprints should be addressed to S. Caillies, CIRLEP, UniversiteÂ de ReimsChampagne Ardennes, 57 rue Pierre Taittinger, 51096 Reims, France.Email: [email protected] r

The authors wish to thank Mr Valdo-Pelegrin, Mr Magnier, and Mr Nouguier for allowing us toconduct the experiment with their students, and to Mr Garcia and Ms Giraudo for their help.

# 2002 Psychology Press Ltdhttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/pp/09541446.html DOI:10.1080/09541440143000069

and the text base they construct during reading are represented as associativenetworks of concepts and propositions. The text is processed in cycles roughlycorresponding to a sentence. Two phases, construction and integration, areinvolved in sentence processing. In the construction phase, text and knowledgeelements are incorporated without any reference to the context. They are acti-vated indiscriminately and many are inappropriate. The construction process ofthis not necessarily coherent text base can be modelled by weak constructionrules, comprising rules for the construction of propositions, rules for inter-connecting the propositions in a network, rules for the activation of knowledgethat proceeds in an associative and bottom-up manner, and rules for constructinginferences. This construction process is followed by an integration process thatyields a text base appropriate to the context and integrated into the knowledgenetwork. This integration process is characterised by a process of spreadingactivation, reinforcing the elements appropriate to the context and inhibiting anddeactivating the irrelevant elements. In this model, working memory is like aspotlight that moves across a text, sentence by sentence, constructing andintegrating a mental representation of the text. This results in a episodic memoryrepresentation that can be well-structured, and that can be represented as acoherent propositional network. This memory representation allows the reader tolater recognise sentences, answer questions, recall the text, and so on. Accordingto this model, the more a reader knows about the domain of a text, the better thereader will comprehend and elaborate a coherent mental representation of thetext (Kintsch, 1994).

In this framework, for learning to occur, the mental representation of the textmust be connected with the reader’s prior knowledge. If this is the case, com-prehension and learning must depend on text coherence and on prior knowledgestructure. There is evidence that these two factors exert a different effect onmemory and on learning from text. Recent studies have shown that the com-prehension performance of readers with prior knowledge was improved whenthe coherence of the text read was weakened, e.g., nouns were replaced bypronouns, and descriptive elaborations and connectives were removed, and thatreaders without relevant prior knowledge need to read a fully coherent, veryexplicit text to construct an efficient representation of the text base (McNamara& Kintsch, 1996; McNamara, Kintsch, Songer, & Kintsch, 1996). Otherresearchers have demonstrated an interaction between the readers’ priorknowledge and the textual semantic coherence (Caillies & DenhieÁ re, 2001;Caillies, DenhieÁ re, & Jhean-Larose, 1999; Caillies & Tapiero, 1997). In thesestudies, two versions of a procedural text, causal and teleological, were pre-sented to three groups of learners, beginners, intermediates, and advanced, in thedomain to be acquired, either car mechanics or text editor. Results showed that ateleological organisation of textual information facilitated the comprehension ofadvanced participants, whereas a temporal–causal organisation facilitated thecomprehension of beginner and intermediate participants. The authors argue that

268 CAILLIES, DENHIEÁ RE, KINTSCH

the interaction obtained could be explained by the overlap between the structureof readers’ prior knowledge, and the semantic coherence of the text; that is tosay that prior knowledge structure of advanced participants is teleological,whereas the knowledge of beginner and intermediate participants is organised ina temporal–causal chain.

This result suggests that a major difference between the prior knowledgeorganisation of beginner and advanced readers can be ascribed to the relation-ships among the goal, the necessary actions to attain the goal, and the outcomeof these actions (Baudet & DenhieÁ re, 1991; Trabasso & van den Broek, 1985).The research reported in this paper focused on studying the effect of priorknowledge structure on memorisation and comprehension of procedural texts,without using different text structures. The main purpose was to investigate thedifference between the prior knowledge organisation of beginner, intermediate,and advanced readers in the domain to be acquired, i.e., the use of a text editorand of a spreadsheet. Specifically, we assume that: (1) for advanced readers, thegoal and the outcome are directly and strongly associated in memory, whereasthe actions necessary to attain the goal are at a subordinate level; (2) forintermediate readers, the goal and the outcome are loosely connected, and theoutcome is more closely related to the actions needed to reach the goal; and (3)for beginner readers, the type of relationships established between the goal, theoutcome, and the actions varies according to the order in which they appear inthe text. Given these assumptions, we can expect an effect of prior knowledgestructure on both encoding and on retrieval of textual information. In our study,we therefore focused on encoding activities as measured by the reading times fordifferent types of sentences, goal, actions, and outcome, as well as activitiesdependent on their retrieval from memory. The texts used in our research werecomposed of three sequences. Each sequence contained a goal, four orderedactions, and an outcome, always presented in this order. Intentionally, a refer-ential coherence break was inserted between the last action of each sequence(action 4) and the following outcome. This coherence break was designed toinvestigate the effect of prior knowledge structure on the reinstatement of pre-vious textual information during reading.

During reading, it is frequently the case that a concept or proposition from theepisodic structure in memory must be reinstated in working memory to ensurethe coherence of the mental representation. Indeed, many experimental results(Fletcher & Bloom, 1988; Graesser, Singer, & Trabasso, 1994; Kintsch & vanDijk, 1978; McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992) have shown that in the case of coherencebreaks, the readers become involved in an inferential process to retrieve thelacking information. This inferential process requires more or less timedepending on the availability of the lacking information. However, authorsdiffer in opinion about what they call availability. According to the minimalists(Albrecht & Myers, 1995; McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992, 1995), the availability ofthe information depends on its referential overlap with the working memory

PRIOR KNOWLEDGE IN UNDERSTANDING TEXT 269

content, whereas, according to the constructionists (Fletcher & Bloom, 1988;Graesser et al., 1994), the availability of information depends on the type ofcausal relation it has with the content of the working memory. Although bothconstructionists and minimalists assume that the reader will be involved in aninferential process when he/she encounters a coherence break such as the oneintroduced in our experimental texts, i.e., between the fourth action and theoutcome sentences, the reason motivating this assumption differs from the oneto the other. For minimalists it is the referential coherence break between thefourth action and the following outcome that will initiate a search in memory toensure coherence, whereas for constructionists it is the lack of necessity and/orsufficiency of the outcome sentence that will initiate it. More precisely, in theconstructionist framework it has been proposed that outcome statements are notsufficiently motivated without the corresponding goal, and that this lack ofnecessity and/or sufficiency initiates a reinstatement (for more details seeBloom, Fletcher, van den Broek, Reitz, & Shapiro, 1990; Fletcher & Bloom,1988; van den Broek, 1990). In our experimental texts, because of the distancein the surface structure between the goal and the outcome sentences, the goal isnot supposed to be available in working memory when the outcome sentence isprocessing. Thus, according to this principle of necessity and sufficiency whichis part of the explanation assumption of the constructionist theory, readers haveto reinstate the goal in working memory to construct a coherent mental repre-sentation of the text when they process the outcome sentence.

In summary, according to minimalist and constructionist hypotheses, theparticipants will do a search in memory to ensure text coherence when theyencounter the outcome sentences. From a minimalist point of view this search isnecessary to establish local referential coherence, whereas from a constructionistpoint of view it is the lack of necessity and sufficiency of the outcome sentencethat will initiate a reinstatement of the goal. Reading time being considered as anindicator of processing time, we hypothesise that the visible outcome of such asearch, referential or causal, will be to increase the reading time of the outcomesentence.

Notice that we derived predictions from minimalist and constructionisthypotheses for processing of procedural texts while the predictions derived fromminimalist and constructionist hypotheses were tested in experiments usingnarrative texts. We assume that the processing of a procedural text by a highknowledge reader is similar to the processing of a narrative text by a skilledreader. Consequently, minimalist and constructionist theories allow us to predictthat the reading time of the outcome sentence will be longer than that of thefourth action sentence, this difference being smaller when the reader has a highknowledge level.

However, if we assume that high knowledge participants use their priorknowledge structure to automatically retrieve the lacking information in long-term memory, as it has been proposed by Ericsson and Kintsch (1995), pre-


dictions will be different. Indeed, according to Ericsson and Kintsch (see alsoKintsch, 1998) and their assumption of long-term working memory theory, theepisodic structure formed during reading, consisting partly of the propositionalnetwork derived from the text, and partly of associated knowledge, provides aretrieval structure to access relevant knowledge necessary for full understandingof the text. In this framework, when the high knowledge reader reads a sentencethat shares no referents with the previous propositions, the retrieval structureshould allow him/her to ensure coherence without additional processing. In thatcase, the beginner reader will try deliberately to link the outcome to the previousaction or to the previous goal to ensure coherence, their retrieval structures beingclose to the text surface, whereas the intermediate and the advanced participantswill be able to automatically retrieve the goal through teleological retrievalstructure.

The investigation of the reading time is necessary to compare these twotheoretical positions, minimalist and constructionist hypotheses, and long-termworking memory theory (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995). In our study, we thereforeasked beginner, intermediate, and advanced participants to read the experimentaltexts one sentence at a time, the reading time being recorded for each sentence.Each experimental text was composed of three sequences, with each sequencecontaining a goal, four ordered actions, and an outcome. A referential coherencebreak was inserted between the fourth action and the following outcome.According to the minimalist and constructionist hypotheses, the three groups ofreaders will do a search in memory to ensure text coherence when theyencounter the outcome sentence. Thus, the reading time of the outcome sentencewill be longer than that of the fourth action sentence, this difference beingsmaller when the reader has a high knowledge level. According to the long-termworking memory theory, only the beginner participants will try deliberately tolink the outcome sentence to the previous text. Thus, the reading time of theoutcome sentence will be longer than that of the fourth action sentence only forbeginner participants.

To test the effect of prior knowledge structures on the retrieval of goals,actions, and outcome from memory, we asked beginner, intermediate, andadvanced participants to perform a primed recognition task (McKoon & Ratcliff,1992; van den Broek & Lorch, 1993) after reading each experimental text. Thesentence to be recognised could be the first action, the third action, or theoutcome of a sequence, and could be preceded either by a goal prime sentence ofthe same sequence or by a neutral control sentence such as ‘‘Remember thistext’’. This task allows us to investigate the relationships that beginner, inter-mediate, and advanced readers established between the goal, the action, and theoutcome sentences, and thus to access the effect of prior knowledge structureson the retrieval of the episodic structure elaborated during reading. If forintermediate and advanced participants, the goal and the outcome are directlyconnected in their prior knowledge structure, then the recognition time of the


actions will be greater than the recognition time of the outcome whatever theprime. The relationship established between the goal and the outcome dependson their prior knowledge structure. If for beginner participants, the relationshipsestablished between the goal, the actions, and the outcome vary according to theorder in which they appear in the text, then the target recognition time will be afunction of the text surface distance between the prime goal and the target(action 1 < action 3 < outcome). To make sure that participants read in order tounderstand, we asked them to answer comprehension questions after eachprimed recognition sequence.

Simulations carried out with the construction–integration model are presentedafter the experimental investigation. Our main purpose was to test directly thedifferential knowledge structures of beginners and advanced readers.

EXPERIMENT

We predict an effect of prior knowledge on reading time, on recognition time,and on the percentage of correct responses on comprehension questions (pre-diction 1). We assume that the reading and the primed recognition times shouldbe shorter for advanced than for intermediate participants, with those ofbeginners being the longest, and that the percentage of accuracy will increaseproportionally to the level of prior knowledge.

We further expect an interaction between prior knowledge and sentence typefor the reading times (prediction 2), and between prior knowledge, prime types,and target types for the primed recognition times (prediction 3).

Reading times

According to minimalist and constructionist hypotheses, the reading time dif-ference between action 4 and outcome will be greater for beginners than for theother two groups, the reading time of the outcome being greater than the readingtime of the action 4 (prediction 2a). According to long-term working memorytheory (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995), the reading time of intermediate andadvanced participants will be shorter for outcome than for action 4 sentences,the reading time decreasing from the beginning to the end of the text, whereasfor beginners, the reading time will increase from the action 4 to the outcomesentences (prediction 2b).

Primed recognition times

For advanced and intermediate participants, it should take longer to recognisethe actions than to recognise the outcome whatever the prime, this differencebeing greater for advanced than for intermediate participants; for beginnerparticipants, without relevant prior knowledge, the recognition time for thetarget will be a function of the distance in the surface structure of the text


between the goal as prime and the target (action 1 < action 3 < outcome). Thus,we predict that the priming effect difference between action 1, and both action 3and outcome targets will be greater for beginners than for the other two groups,and will be greater for intermediates than for advanced (prediction 3).

For advanced participants, the recognition times will be the same for bothgoal and control primes because these two types of prime equally affect thereactivation of the participants’ episodic goal structure (Ericsson & Kintsch,1995).

For intermediate participants, the predictions will be different: (1) in the casewhere the prime is the goal, both the first action (action 1) and the outcome willbe recognised faster than the third action (action 3) because action 1 occurs closeto the goal in the text, and the outcome is related to the goal in memory; (2) inthe case where the prime is a control sentence, the recognition time will reflectthe participants’ memory organisation and will thus be shorter for the outcomethan for both action 1 and action 3.

For beginner participants, our predictions are the following: (1) in the casewhere the prime is the goal, beginner participants will recognise action 1 fasterthan the other targets (action 3 and outcome) because the goal presentationreactivates more rapidly the target closest to the goal in the participants’ epi-sodic surface structure; (2) in the case where the prime is a control sentence,action 1 will not be reactivated and will not differ from either action 3 or theoutcome.

METHOD

Materials

Six texts were constructed, three describing the use of Microsoft WordTM andthree describing the use of Microsoft ExcelTM . Each text was composed of threesequences, with each sequence containing a goal, four ordered actions, and anoutcome always presented in this order. There were no connectives in the texts,and a referential coherence break occurred between action 4 and obtained out-come (see Table 1).

The sentences to be recognised were preceded either by a goal prime sentenceor by a control prime sentence such as ‘‘Remember this text’’. The true targetscould be action 1, action 3, or the outcome of the sequences. The false targets wereconstructed by modifying a word or a clause of the true target, equally often at thebeginning, the middle, or the end of the sentence (see Table 2). Twelve pairs ofsentences were presented after each text reading, six true targets and six falsetargets. Six recognition lists were constructed in such a way that every potentialtarget sentence could be seen in goal prime and control prime conditions. For eachtext, four comprehension questions were also constructed to make sure thatparticipants read in order to understand. For each question, the correct answerappeared within a set of two distractors (see Table 3 for an example).


TABLE 1Example of text: ``Print text’’

Sentence type Content

General goal To print a paragraph, it is necessary to perform the following three sequences ofactions.

Sequence 1Goal Select the paragraph to be printedAction 1 Position the cursor at one extremity of the paragraphAction 2 Press the mouse buttonAction 3 Place the cursor at the other extremityAction 4 Press simultaneously the ‘‘Shift’’ key and the mouse buttonOutcome The paragraph appears in reverse-out type

Sequence 2Goal Select the ‘‘Print’’ commandAction 1 Position the cursor on the ‘‘File’’ menuAction 2 Keep the finger pressed on the mouse buttonAction 3 Choose the ‘‘Print’’ commandAction 4 Release the mouse buttonOutcome The ‘‘Print’’ dialog box appears on the screen

Sequence 3Goal Print the paragraphAction 1 Type the desired number of copies on the keyboardAction 2 Put a quotation in the option button ‘‘Print selection only’’ with the mouseAction 3 Position the cursor on ‘‘OK’’Action 4 Press the mouse buttonOutcome Word sends the paragraph to the printer

TABLE 2Example of couple prime-target

Prime Target

Goal. Select the paragraph to be printed True Action 1: Position the cursor at oneextremity of the paragraph

Control. Remember this text True Action: Place the cursor at the otherextremity

Goal. Select the ‘‘Print . . .’’ command True Outcome: The ‘‘Print’’ dialog boxappears on the screen

Control. Recognise this text False Action 1: Position the cursor on the‘‘book’’ menu

274

Participants

Fifty-four participants from Montpellier (France) read the six texts and after-wards performed a primed recognition task. Eighteen of the participants had noexperience in the use of computer software tools, eighteen had intermediate, andeighteen advanced knowledge. Participants were assigned to one of three groupsaccording to their prior knowledge, measured by their scores on a questionnaire.This prior knowledge questionnaire consisted of two sections. The first sectiondeals with the use of Microsoft Word, whereas the second refers to the use ofMicrosoft Excel. Each section was composed of three tasks: (1) categorisation ofcommands in files, (2) rearrangement of sub-goals for achieving a super-ordinate goal, and (3) multiple-choice questions. The objective of the categor-isation task was to capture the spatial and semantic representations of partici-pants, whereas the rearrangement and multiple-choice tasks enable us toapprehend the functional aspect of participants’ knowledge. A score expressedas a percentage was extracted from the two sections. Participants were classifiedas beginners, intermediates, and advanced according to this score, which wasintended to reflect their spatial, semantic, and functional knowledge. Partici-pants with scores below 50% were assigned to the beginners group, those whohad a score between 50% and 68% to the intermediates group, and those with ascore between 69% and 86% to the advanced group. The beginner participantswere students in the Psychology Department. The intermediate and the advancedparticipants were students either in the Computer Science Department or in theEngineering Institute.

Procedure

Participants were tested individually. All participants read three texts, eachdescribing three functions of the text editor Microsoft Word, and three moretexts, each describing three functions of the spreadsheet Microsoft Excel. Onepractice text was presented first. Participants read the practice text and the sixexperimental texts one sentence at a time, advancing to the next sentence in atext by pressing the space bar on the computer’s keyboard. Participants’ readingtimes were recorded for each sentence from presentation of the sentence untilthe space bar was pressed. The order of presentation of the two sub-sets of

TABLE 3Example of comprehension question

When you select a paragraph, you provoke:

[ ] its reverse-out apparition[ ] its bold apparition[ ] its moving


material was counterbalanced across participants: Participants started to readeither Word or Excel texts. The presentation of the text was randomised for eachsub-set.

After reading each text that was presented, self-paced, participants performeda primed recognition task. They were told that on each trial they would receivetwo sentences. The precise sequence of events on each trial was as follows: Theword ‘‘Ready’’ was presented centred on the screen for 500 ms followed by amask. After a delay of 700 ms, the prime, either a goal or a control sentence, waspresented for 2000 ms followed by the presentation of a second mask. After 700ms, the target sentence was presented until the ‘‘yes’’ or ‘‘no’’ key was pressed.Response accuracy and latency were recorded from presentation of the targetsentence. Participants were required to read the first sentence in order tounderstand it and to decide as quickly as possible whether the second statementwas presented in the text they had read. Participants received 12 pairs of sen-tences after each reading. The order of presentation of sentence pairs was ran-domised. Finally, participants answered four comprehension questions.

RESULTS

Reading times

Two 3 £ 6 analyses of variance were conducted, one by-participants analysis,and the other by-item analysis (F1 and F2, respectively). Prior knowledge wastreated as a between-participants factor (beginners, intermediates, andadvanced), and sentence type as a within factor.

The repeated measures ANOVA conducted on the reading times per word(see Table 4) revealed a marginally significant effect of prior knowledge,F1(2, 51) = 2.77, MSe = 125834, p < .07; F2(2, 150) = 74.08, MSe = 1809, p <.01, mainly indicating that the reading times were somewhat longer for beginnerparticipants (M = 388 ms) than for intermediate and advanced participants (M =371 ms), F1(1, 51) = 4.29, p < .05; F2(1, 150) = 106.23, p < .01.

Consistent with the prediction 1, the effect of sentence type was significant,F1(5, 255) = 100.29, MSe = 8076, p < .01; F2(5, 75) = 31.25, MSe = 8643,

TABLE 4Mean reading times of the six sentence types as a function of prior

knowledge (ms per word)

Goal Action 1 Action 2 Action 3 Action 4 Outcome

Beginners 528 473 336 352 305 335Intermediates 461 406 318 336 309 292Advanced 416 365 279 323 281 271


p < .01. The reading times decreased from the beginning to the end of the text.The computation of contrasts showed a significant difference between goal andaction 1, F1(1, 255) = 28.82, p < .01; F2(1, 75) = 9.81, p < .01, between action 1and action 2, F1(1, 255) = 107.69, p < .01; F2(1, 75) = 33.74, p < .01, betweenaction 2 and action 3 only in the by-participants analysis, F1(1, 255) = 28.82, p <.01; F2(1, 75) = 1.71, p = .19, and between action 3 and action 4, F1(1, 255) =6.67, p < .02; F2(1, 75) = 3.45, p < .07. The reading times decreased from thebeginning to the end of each sequence, except action 4 and outcome sentences.

More interestingly, the knowledge by sentences type interaction was sig-nificant, F1(10, 255) = 2.67, MSe = 8076, p < .01; F2(10, 150) = 3.40, MSe =1809, p < .01. The most direct test of our competing predictions was provided bycontrasting the reading time of fourth action and outcome sentences 2 for thebeginners group and the intermediate and advanced groups. This computationreveals that the difference in reading times between outcome and action 4 wasgreater for the beginners group (d = +30) than for the other two groups (d =¡14), F1(1, 255) = 4.13, p < .05; F2(1, 150) = 6.61, p < .05. Consistent withprediction 2b, the reading times of beginner participants were longer for out-come than for action 4 sentences, whereas they continued decreasing fromaction 4 to the outcome sentences for intermediate and advanced participants.

Primed recognition

Eight 3 £ 2 £ 3 analyses of variance were conducted. Four were conducted forthe correct recognition time per word for both true target responses and falsetarget responses, two by-participants analyses and two other by-item analyses(F1 and F2, respectively), and four for the recognition errors for true target andfalse target responses. Prior knowledge was treated as a between-participantsfactor (beginners, intermediates, and advanced), and both prime (goal andcontrol) and target (outcome, action 1, and action 3) as within-factors.

True targets

The effect of prior knowledge was significant, F1(2, 51) = 9.51, MSe = 24690, p< .01; F2(2, 20) = 76.09, MSe = 1043, p < .01. Contrary to our prediction 1, therecognition times per word (see Table 5) were shorter for the beginner parti-cipants than for the other knowledge groups (M = 255 vs M = 334 ms), F1(1, 51)= 18.59, p < .01; F2(1, 20) = 147.65, p < .01. The advanced and the intermediatesdiffered significantly only in the item analysis (M = 327 vs M = 341 ms),F2(1, 20) = 4.52, p < .05. Moreover, the mean number of errors (see Table 6) waslow and was similar for the three groups of participants: 0.85 for beginners, 0.92for intermediates, and 0.72 for advanced, F1 < 1; F2(2, 20) = 1.06, MSe = 2.97, p= .36.

Consistent with the prediction 3, the Knowledge £ Target £ Prime inter-action was significant in the participant analysis, F1(4, 102) = 3.06, MSe = 2725,


p < .02, and marginally significant in the item analysis, F2(4, 20) = 2.37, MSe =1082, p < .09, for the recognition times. This interaction mainly indicated thatthe priming effect difference between action 1 and other targets was greater forbeginners than for intermediates and advanced (d = 42 vs d = –19.75), F1(1, 102)= 4.90, p < .05; F2(1, 20) = 4.11, p < .06, and was greater for intermediates thanfor advanced (d = –49.5 vs d = 10, F1(1, 102) = 4.81, p < .05; F2(1, 20) = 4.04, p< .06. For beginners, the priming effect, that is to say, the difference betweenrecognition time in goal and control conditions, was greater for action 1 targets

TABLE 5Mean recognition times (ms per word) of the three true target

types as a function of prime type and prior knowledge

Control prime Goal prime Priming effect

BeginnersAction 1 279 230 49Action 3 266 254 12Outcome 252 250 2

IntermediatesAction 1 325 345 –20Action 3 389 344 45Outcome 332 318 14

AdvancedAction 1 344 335 9Action 3 345 359 –14Outcome 298 286 12

TABLE 6Mean number of errors on the three true target types as a

function of prime type and prior knowledge

Control prime Goal prime Priming effect

BeginnersAction 1 1.4 1.1 0.3Action 3 0.8 0.6 0.2Outcome 0.5 0.6 –0.1

IntermediatesAction 1 0.9 1.4 –0.5Action 3 0.9 0.7 0.2Outcome 0.7 0.9 –0.2

AdvancedAction 1 0.9 0.5 0.4Action 3 1.3 0.8 0.5Outcome 0.3 0.5 –0.2


than for both action 3 and outcome, whereas for intermediates the priming effectwas greater for action 3 and outcome targets than for action 1 target (see Table5). This interaction was not significant for the errors (F1 < 1; F2 < 1).

For each knowledge group the analyses showed the following results.

Beginner participants. The Prime £ Target interaction was significant,F1(2, 34) = 3.62, MSe = 1457, p < .05; F2(2, 10) = 4.87, MSe = 343, p < .05, andindicated that the difference between control and goal conditions was greater foraction 1 than for both outcome and action 3, d = 49 vs d = 7; F1(1, 34) = 6.88, p< .05; F2(1, 10) = 9.53, p < .01. Action 1 was recognised faster than the othertwo targets only when the goal was used as prime.

Intermediate participants. The Prime £ Target interaction was notsignificant, F1(2, 34) = 2.13, MSe = 4514, p = .13; F2(2, 10) = 1.31, MSe =2199, p = .31. Although the recognition times of the three targets did notsignificantly vary as a function of the nature of the prime, both outcome andaction 1 targets were recognised faster than action 3 (330 vs 366 ms), F1(1, 34) =8.54, p < .01; F2(1, 10) = 3.86, p < .08.

Advanced participants. The Prime £ Target interaction was also notsignificant (F1 < 1; F2 < 1). Outcome target was recognised significantly fasterthan both action 1 and action 3 targets (292 vs 346 ms), F1 (1, 34) = 35.04, p <.01; F2(1, 10) = 15.28, p < .01, which did not differ, F1(1, 34) = 1.46, p = .23;F2 < 1.

False targets

The effect of prior knowledge was significant for both rejection times, F1(2, 51)= 4.49, MSe = 24933, p < .02; F2(2, 20) = 27.29, MSe = 1298, p < .01, andrejection errors, F1(2, 51) = 4.05, MSe = 1.88, p < .05; F2(2, 20) = 9.16, MSe =2.73, p < .01 (see Table 7). The rejection times of false targets were shorter for

TABLE 7Mean rejection times (ms per word) of false targets and mean number of

errors as a function of the three knowledge groups

Times Errors

Control prime Goal prime Control prime Goal prime

Beginners 268 278 1 1.3Intermediates 335 336 0.7 0.7Advanced 317 319 0.6 0.8


beginner participants than for the other two groups (M = 273 vs M = 326 ms),F1(1, 51) = 8.29, p < .01; F2(2, 20) = 48.48, p < .01, whereas the advanced andintermediate participants did not significantly differ (M = 318 vs M = 336 ms).Although beginners were the fastest, they made more rejection errors than theother two groups (M = 1.19 vs M = 0.74), F1(1, 51) = 15.12, p < .01; F2(1, 20) =18.33, p < .01.

Comprehension questions

The effect of prior knowledge on comprehension questions was significant,F1(2, 36) = 26.63, MSe = 245, p < .01; F2(1, 36) = 14.99, MSe = 147, p < .01.The percentage of accuracy was smaller for beginner participants than for theother two groups (68% vs 85%), F1(1, 36) = 47.23, p < .01; F2(1, 44) = 25.58, p< .01, and was greater for advanced than for intermediate participants (89% vs82%), F1(1, 36) = 6.07, p < .02; F2(1, 44) = 4.41, p < .05.

DISCUSSION

The analyses showed that readers with different levels of prior knowledge differwith regard to reading times, recognition performances, and to comprehensionquestions. Consistent with prediction 1, the more prior knowledge a reader has,the shorter the reading time, and the higher the percentage of accuracy oncomprehension questions. Indeed, we observed that the reading times wereshortest for the advanced and longest for the beginners, and that the percentageof accuracy in comprehension questions was greater for advanced and inter-mediate than for beginner participants. Surprisingly, we found that the recog-nition times of targets were shorter for the beginners than for the intermediateand advanced participants. Moreover, beginners did not make more recognitionerrors than the two other groups. However, they made more rejection errors thanthe intermediate and advanced participants did. Our interpretation is thatbeginners recognised and rejected targets on the base of the surface repre-sentation of the text.

The Prior Knowledge £ Sentence Type interaction indicates that the differ-ence among the three knowledge groups resides in the encoding of the outcome,which is consistent with our assumption. The reading time of intermediate andadvanced participants decreased from the beginning to the end of the text, andfrom the beginning to the end of each sequence, whereas those of beginnersincreased significantly from the action 4 to the outcome sentence of eachsequence. Indeed, beginners did a search in memory to ensure the referential orcausal coherence of the text; intermediates and advanced did not, the lackinginformation being available in memory. This result is compatible with thehypothesis of a long-term working memory (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995) and isincompatible with the minimalist and constructionist hypotheses (Graesser et al.,1994; McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992).


As we predicted, the significant Condition £ Target £ Knowledge inter-action demonstrated that the priming effect between the recognition times ofaction 1 and those of action 3 and outcome is greater for beginners than for thetwo other groups and is greater for intermediate than for advanced participants.The separate analyses indicated that, when the prime was the goal, beginnersrecognised action 1 faster than the other targets (action 3 and outcome) becauseit was closer to the goal in the surface structure, and that intermediate andadvanced participants recognised the outcome faster than actions whatever theprime.

Simulations

We have attributed our experimental results to presumptive differences in theknowledge structure of beginners, intermediate, and advanced participants.Specifically, we have assumed that the knowledge of beginners is organised as aseries of causal links, as shown in Figure 1(a): A goal leads to a sequence ofactions, which eventually produce a certain outcome. In contrast, the knowledgeof advanced participants is hierarchically organised: Goal and outcome aredirectly linked and the actions are subordinated to the goal (Caillies & DenhieÁ re,2001). This teleological organisation is shown in Figure 1(b). Earlier work(Caillies et al., 1999; Caillies & Tapiero, 1997) had shown that beginner par-ticipants profited from a text that was organised causally, as in Figure 1(a),whereas advanced participants did better with a teleological organisation. Thereaction time results reported previously further support these claims. In thepresent section we show that a model of text comprehension can account for

(b)

Figure 1. Knowledge organisation of (a) beginners, shown by a causal chain, and (b) advanced,shown by a teleological hierarchy.

(a)


these results if and only if we assume that advanced and beginners operate withknowledge structures as hypothesised in Figure 1.

We use the construction–integration model of Kintsch (1988, 1998) tosimulate the state of a subject’s memory after reading the experimental textswhen they respond to the test probes. Both beginners and advanced have thenecessary knowledge to respond correctly, the difference lies in the organisationof that knowledge. When reading the experimental texts, the relevant items ofknowledge are automatically retrieved and linked with the appropriate textpropositions. Thus, to simulate beginner performance, knowledge structuresorganised as in Figure 1(a) are linked to the corresponding text propositions (thegoal node is linked to the proposition expressing a goal in the text, action 1 islinked to a proposition expressing action 1, etc.). Advanced performance wassimulated in the same way, except that the knowledge nodes were organised asin Figure 1(b). Each sequence in the text (see Table 1) contained six sentences,and each sentence was linked to its corresponding knowledge node. The textpropositions and their pattern of interconnections via referential coherence were,of course, exactly the same for beginners and advanced, the only differencebetween the two simulations being the way in which the knowledge nodes wereorganised.

These simulations—separate for beginners and advanced—yielded a patternof activation values for the text propositions and the corresponding knowledgenodes, which is the model’s estimate of the episodic long-term memory structuregenerated by beginners and advanced when reading the experimental texts. Tosimulate the recognition test, the prime (the goal of a sequence) and a target(either one of the actions or the outcome) were linked up to the correspondingnodes (both text and knowledge nodes of the episodic memory structure) andactivation was allowed to spread to these items. It was assumed that the morehighly activated a test item becomes, the less time will be needed for recogni-tion. Thus, activation values as calculated by the model and the empiricallyobserved response times should be negatively correlated.

The Spearman rho correlation between activation values and response timeswas –.65 (p < .05) for the beginner group and –.83 (p < .01) for the advancedgroup. These correlations depended on the use of the appropriate knowledgestructure: If beginner response times were correlated with activation valuescalculated from a model assuming an advanced knowledge organisation, themodel failed (rho = –.05). Similarly, advanced response times did not correlatewith model predictions based upon a beginner knowledge organisation (rho =.28). It is also noteworthy that a model that did not include any prior knowledge(text propositions only) could not predict the results (rho > 0 for both beginnersand advanced).

We did not attempt to simulate the results for the intermediate group. Theirknowledge organisation is, presumably, some mixture of the beginner andadvanced structures, but we have no way of knowing precisely what. Neither the


beginner nor the advanced knowledge structures predicted intermediate responsetimes.

Thus, these simulations corroborate the interpretation of our results. If themodel is given the right knowledge structure—a causal structure for thebeginners and a teleological structure for the advanced—it predicts the obtainedrecognition time data. Without the right knowledge structure, it is unable to doso.

CONCLUSION

The purpose of this experiment was to investigate the relationships that readerswith different levels of prior knowledge establish between the elements of aprocedural text. It was assumed that the differences in prior knowledge orga-nisation of beginner, intermediate, and advanced participants are mainly due todifferences in the relationships they established between a goal, four actions, andthe obtained outcome (Figure 1), and that these relationships, which reflect theorganisation of knowledge in memory, governed the reading times and theretrieval of information. Our results support this assumption.

As we assumed, beginners did not establish a relationship between the goaland the outcome, whereas the intermediate and advanced participants did.Indeed, the analysis of the primed recognition results showed that for thebeginners, the target recognition time varied with the surface distance betweenthe prime and the target, whereas, for the advanced and intermediate partici-pants, the outcome was always recognised faster than the actions. This resultsuggests that the beginners did not establish a relation between the goal and theoutcome during reading, and that, for the intermediate and advanced partici-pants, the outcome was more available in memory than the actions. The readingtimes data showed that the beginners spent more time reading the outcomesentence than the other two knowledge groups, which suggests that they tried toestablish coherence by a search of information in memory (Bloom et al., 1990).For the intermediate and the advanced participants, the decrease in reading timesobserved between action 4 and the outcome sentence indicated that they did notspend time on a search in memory during the outcome sentence reading. Thisresult is not consistent with constructionist and minimalist hypotheses (Graesseret al., 1994; McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992).

Both reading time and recognition time analyses allow us to conclude thatintermediate and advanced participants elaborated during reading a teleologicalepisodic structure which provides a retrieval structure to access relevantknowledge necessary for full understanding of the text. The advanced partici-pants possess a prior knowledge structure that is teleological, the goal beingdirectly related to the outcome, elaborated during reading a structure in whichthe goal and the outcome are strongly associated and make up the top of thehierarchy. Consequently, the goal rapidly becomes available during the reading


of the outcome sentence, and the processing of the coherence break do notrequire a consuming search in memory. When these participants performed theprimed recognition task, the goal and outcome propositions rapidly becomeavailable because they are retrieved through an episodic retrieval structure(Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995).

Contrary to our expectations, the beginner participants recognised true tar-gets faster than the other two groups, the mean number of errors being equalfor the three groups. Our interpretation is that the answers of the beginnerswere based mainly upon the surface features of the text, whereas the answersof both the intermediate and the advanced participants resulted in processingat a deeper semantic level. The analyses of the reading times and of theresponses to the comprehension questions confirm this interpretation.Although the beginner participants were the fastest for recognition, they werethe slowest for the reading times and for the accuracy percentage in the com-prehension task.

The simulation results show that construction–integration model proposed byKintsch (1988) can be used to test the plausibility of hypotheses concerning theeffect of prior knowledge structures on the elaboration of an episodic mentalrepresentation and on retrieval. By adding the appropriate prior knowledgenetwork in the simulations, significant correlations between proportion ofrecalled propositions and activation were obtained. In fact, we can testassumptions on knowledge structure, on text representation, and on the inter-action between these two representation systems by comparing activation valueswith participants’ recognition times.

A growing body of literature supports the assumption that readers haveroutine access to distant information, and specifically to goal information(Dopkins, Klin, & Myers, 1993; Huitema, Dopkins, Klin, & Myers, 1993;Rizzella & O’Brien, 1996). Some studies have emphasised the role of localcoherence breaks in the reinstatement of distant information (McKoon & Rat-cliff, 1992), others the role of the causality (Lutz & Radvansky, 1997), and yetothers have shown that overlapping traces could play a role in reactivatingbackgrounded information (Albrecht & Myers, 1995). Our study demonstratedthe effect of prior knowledge organisation on the encoding and on the retrievalof expository information. Our results suggest the necessity of taking intoaccount the prior knowledge structure of readers in reading and in text under-standing. Consistent with our main assumption, our experimental investigationshowed that beginner, intermediate, and advanced participants differed in therelationships they established between the goal, the necessary actions to attainthe goal, and the obtained outcome. We assume that prior knowledge providesthe retrieval structures that give readers direct access to the information theyneed when they need it. Thus, a high-knowledge reader is able to elaboratehierarchical retrieval structure, which allows him/her to automatically retrievedistant information in the surface structure of the text.


To conclude, understanding the interaction between prior knowledge struc-tures, text features (Kintsch, 1994), or text structures (Caillies et al., 1999;Caillies & Tapiero, 1997), and comprehension measures (McNamara & Kintsch,1996; McNamara et al., 1996) is fundamental for a theoretical account of textcomprehension. The construction–integration model proposed by Kintsch (1988,1998) can provide a framework to approach these interactions.

Manuscript received August 1998Revised manuscript received September 2000

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The effect of prior knowledge on understanding from text ... processing... · CREPCO,UniversiteÂdeProvence,Aix-en-Provence,France WalterKintsch ... Afterreadingeachtextthatwaspresented,self-paced,participantsperformed