A cross-cultural perspective on reading comprehension

SUBJECTS FROM THE UNITED STATES and India read letters about an Indian and an American wedding and recalled them following interpolated tasks. Subjects read the native passage more rapidly, recalled a larger amount of information from the native passage, produced more culturally appropriate elaborations of the native passage, and produced more culturally based distortions of the foreign passage. Whether recalling the native or foreign passage, subjects recalled more of the text elements rated as important by other subjects with the same cultural heritage. The results were interpreted as showing the pervasive influence on comprehension and memory of schemata embodying knowledge of the content of a discourse.

[1]  N. S. Johnson,et al.  Remembrance of things parsed: Story structure and recall , 1977, Cognitive Psychology.

[2]  Roger W. Schvaneveldt.  Contextual Constraints on Ambiguous Word Recognition. , 1974 .

[3]  N. Stein,et al.  A Developmental Study of Children's Recall of Story Material. , 1975 .

[4]  Richard C. Anderson,et al.  Recall of Previously Unrecallable Information Following a Shift in Perspective. Technical Report No. 41. , 1977 .

[5]  W. Kintsch,et al.  The role of culture‐specific schemata in the comprehension and recall of stories∗ , 1978 .

[6]  Mandler JeanM..  A code in the node: The use of a story schema in retrieval , 1978 .

[7]  J. L. Morgan,et al.  Two Types of Convention in Indirect Speech Acts. Technical Report No. 52. , 1977 .

[8]  B. Meyer.  The organization of prose and its effects on memory , 1975 .

[9]  H. Bowman.  Marriage for moderns , 1942 .

[10]  Richard C. Anderson.  Schema-Directed Processes in Language Comprehension , 1978 .

[11]  D. Rumelhart.  NOTES ON A SCHEMA FOR STORIES , 1975 .

[12]  Richard C. Anderson,et al.  Frameworks for Comprehending Discourse , 1977 .

[13]  D. Swinney,et al.  Effects of prior context upon lexical access during sentence comprehension. , 1976 .

[14]  Richard C. Anderson,et al.  Effects of three types of inserted questions on learning from prose. , 1971 .

[15]  Leighton W. Hazlehurst.  Entrepreneurship and the merchant castes in a Punjabi city , 1967, The Journal of Asian Studies.

[16]  Khushwant Singh.  A bride for the sahib and other stories , 1967 .