Individual differences in readers' sentence- and text-level representations

Poor reading comprehension is often associated with a failure to make appropriate inferences during reading. Do less skilled readers fail to make inferences because they fail to construct accurate propositional representations? We conducted two experiments to investigate individual differences in readers' sentence- and text-level representations. In Experiment 1, we found no differences in the two groups' ability to perform a task that is sensitive to the underlying propositional structure of sentences. However, in Experiment 2, we found large differences in the extent to which skilled and less-skilled readers integrated ideas from different parts of a text. We suggest that an important processing bottleneck among less skilled college-aged readers occurs at the discourse level. (C) 1997 Academic Press.