The Influence of Religious Affiliation on Children's Memory for Text Information

THE CURRENT STUDY investigated the impact of culturally specific prior knowledge on the reading comprehension of young subjects whose religious affiliation was either strongly Catholic or Jewish. After reading a culturally neutral passage, all subjects read two additional passages, each specific to one of the two religious groups. Measures of free recall, probed recall, and reading time were used as dependent variables. Prior religious knowledge about a topic was a powerful factor in post-reading performance. Each group recalled more text-based propositions and generated more implicit recall for their culturally familiar passage. In addition, they made fewer errors in recall on the passage that contained familiar material, and they took less time to read that passage. Finally, they were significantly more successful at responding to probed recall items. The findings indicate that subjects were much more likely to comprehend text when they had a culturally appropriate schema into which to incorporate the new information. In addition, the presence of such schemata apparently acted to limit children's comprehension of unfamiliar text so that accuracy was diminished and distortion was increased.