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

We investigated the relationships that readers with different levels of prior knowledge established between the elements of a procedural text. More specifically, we examined the relationships between the goal, a sequence of actions, and their outcome. Our hypothesis was that the main difference between the prior knowledge organisation of beginner, intermediate, and advanced participants can be described in terms of these relationships. To test this hypothesis, we investigated participants' reading times and used a primed recognition task with the goal as prime and both the outcome and the actions as targets. As we assumed, results indicated that the beginner participants did not establish a relationship between the goal 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 results and to reproduce the effect of prior knowledge on the retrieval of textual information.