Working‐memory capacity and the use of elaborative inferences in text comprehension

Abstract The purpose of this research was to determine if individual differences in working‐memory capacity are related to the ways readers use inferences to facilitate text comprehension. Two groups of subjects, who differed in working‐memory span, read difficult narrative passages a few sentences at a time. The subjects furnished "thinking out loud" protocols of their emerging interpretations. Idea units from the subjects' protocols were categorized with particular attention to those idea units that expressed a general or specific elaborative inference. Several differences between the two groups of subjects emerged. Low‐memory‐span subjects produced significantly more specific elaborations than the high‐span readers. In addition, most of the specific elaborations that were produced by the high‐span readers were toward the end of a passage. Low‐span readers had a more even distribution of specific elaborations throughout their protocols. Thus, readers with adequate working‐memory capacity can keep their interpretations more open‐ended and await more information from the text. Readers with low working‐memory capacity appear to face a tradeoff between maintaining an overall passage representation (global coherence) and maintaining sentence‐to‐sentence connections (local coherence). An analysis of the number of inferences that represented new thematic interpretations suggested that some low‐span readers in our sample emphasized global coherence and others emphasized local coherence.