Instantiation in Skilled and Less Skilled Comprehenders

Previous research has shown that adults tend to infer particular meanings of words, according to their context, a process that has been termed instantiation. An experiment was carried out to investigate the relation between 7 to 8 year olds’ skill at reading comprehension and their ability to instantiate. A cued recall paradigm was used: the subjects were presented with a series of short sentences, and either the general noun that had appeared in the original sentence, or a particular noun that fitted the context, was given as a cue. The results showed that both skilled and less skilled comprehenders recalled the original sentences equally well, given the original nouns, but that the performance of the skilled group was superior when they were given the particular word cues, indicating that the skilled comprehenders were instantiating more readily. An independent test showed that their superior performance was not attributable to their better general knowledge.