The strategic nature of less skilled readers’ suppression problems

This study was conducted to investigate the nature of cognitive inhibition as it operates in the comprehension of language. Previous research has shown that the ability to inhibit or suppress irrelevant information underlies individual differences in reading skill. Less skilled readers appear to have difficulty suppressing active, but irrelevant, information during comprehension. Two different accounts of less skilled readers’ suppression problems were investigated. First, less skilled readers may have deficiencies in an automatic suppression mechanism. Alternatively, they may have difficulty executing a strategic process necessary to overcome response conflict. The results of three experiments supported the latter hypothesis. Less skilled readers were prone to interference only when a test probe had an ambiguous relation to a preceding context and a task required or was susceptible to context checking at test.