Individual differences in processing coherence markers: the effect of metacognitive knowledge

Abstract

Coherence markers such as connectives positively influence the reading process and reading comprehension for most, but not all, readers. Metacognitive knowledge, concerning strategies to regulate the reading process, may explain these individual differences. We investigated how metacognitive knowledge affects the processing of high- and low-coherent texts. Online eye-movement data and offline reading-comprehension data were gathered from 60 eighthgrade students with high or low metacognitive knowledge, but equal in knowledge of connectives. The online data showed that both groups benefit from connectives, but not to the same extent. Readers with high metacognitive knowledge looked longer and more often back from the connective itself to previous text parts than readers with low metacognitive knowledge. In addition, they displayed a much stronger ‘bridging’ effect at the end of sentences: they briefly looked back to previous text, and proceeded to integrate the two clauses faster. Their reading behavior led to better information integration, as the group with more metacognitive knowledge obtained higher scores on comprehension questions measuring local sentence integration.