Text Comprehension Difficulties and Embodied Memory Processes

Abstract The purpose of the present study was to investigate further the semantic processing impairments of less skilled comprehenders. It tested the hypothesis that this difficulty results from an alteration in the multimodal integration mechanism involved in knowledge emergence as described within multi-trace memory models. To test this assumption, Brunel et al.’s (2010) Experiment 2 was adapted for 27 skilled comprehenders and 32 less skilled comprehenders’ adolescents from the 7th and the 8th Grades. The experiment was divided into an integration phase and an experimental phase. During the integration phase, participants had to categorise two geometric shapes, one of which was systematically presented simultaneously with a white noise. To determine whether the white noise has been integrated as a feature of the shape, the experimental phase used a priming paradigm in which the shapes categorised previously were used as primes. The targets were objects that are usually associated with a sound or not. Participants had to categorise the targets’ size. The analysis that was carried out on the correct response times revealed that only skilled comprehenders showed the priming effect observed in adults in Brunel et al.: they were faster to categorise noisy objects when preceded by sound primes than by silent primes. These results suggest that less skilled comprehenders did not integrate the sound with the shape into memory during the integration phase, resulting later in difficulties in the emergence of the trace from memory. These findings are discussed within both embodied and memory-based approaches to reading comprehension.