Semantic and Syntactic Bases of Text Comprehension.

In order to comprehend, readers must be able to analyze, integrate and make inferences about the information present in texts. Recent research suggests that the success of these processes is determined by the interaction of two sources of information 1 factors in the text that affect its readability and 2 the skill with which the reader performs the various processes that comprise reading. The purpose of this research was to investigate the way in which two text-based factors, word relationships and surface syntactic structure, interact with reader skill to affect readers ability to analyze the semantic relationships present in a text and to make inferences based on those semantic analyses. The influence of word relationships was assessed by manipulating the degree of semantic entailment between two words in a passage. Entailing words are those that are thought to semantically obligate the presence of an associated case word e.g., the action murdered obligates the presence of an agent care word the killer and a patient case word the victim the action died does not obligate these case words. The influence of syntactic structure was assessed by manipulating the syntactic class verbadjective in which an entailing word appeared in a passage.