Abstract
Our purpose was to compare the effect of two types of textual semantic coherence — causal and teleological — on the organization of the mental representation elaborated after reading by learners with different levels of prior knowledge. Beginners, Intermediates and Advanced in computer domain read either the causal or the teleological version of a text describing three functions of a text editor, then performed a cued recall and a recognition task. We assumed that Advanced learners build a mental representation of the domain organized in a hierarchical goal/sub-goals structure, whereas Beginners and Intermediates have a mental representation organized in a causal path. If this is so, the results should indicate a significant interaction between prior knowledge and the semantic coherence of the texts: for the Advanced learners, recall and recognition of the teleological text should be better, whereas for the Beginners and Intermediates, the reverse was expected. As we assumed, results indicated that a teleological organization of textual information facilitated the comprehension of Advanced participants while a temporal-causal organization facilitated the comprehension of Beginner and Intermediate participants. The Construction-Integration model of Kintsch (1988, 1998) was used to, simulate the recall results and to reproduce the effect of prior knowledge on the retrieval of textual information.
Résumé
L’objectif de cet article était d’appréhender l’effet de deux types de cohérence sémantique textuelle — causale et téléologique — sur l’organisation de la représentation mentale construite à l’issue de la lecture par des lecteurs de différents niveaux de connaissance. Des Débutants, des Intermédiaires et des Avancés dans le domaine informatique devaient lire soit la version causale, soit la version téléologique d’un texte décrivant trois fonctions d’un traitement de texte, puis devaient effectuer une épreuve de rappel indicé testée était la suivante: les Avancés construiront une représentation mentale du domaine organisée en un arbre de but/sous-buts alors que les Débutants et les Intermédiaires élaboreront une représentation organisée en un chemin causal. En d’autres termes, nous nous attendions à observer une interaction entre les connaissances initiales des lecteurs et le type de cohérence textuelle: les performances de rappel et de reconnaissance des Avancés seront supérieures suite à la lecture du texte téléologique que suite à celle du texte causal alors que l’inverse est attendu pour les Débutants et Intermédiaires. Les résultats obtenus indiquent que l’organisation téléologique facilite la compréhension des Avancés alors que l’organisation temporo-causale facilite la compréhension des Débutants et Intermédiaires. Pour tester la plausibilité formelle de notre hypothèse, des simulations ont été réalisées dans le cadre du modèle Construction-Intégration de Kintsch (1988; 1998) et sont présentées après les résultats expérimentaux.
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Caillies, S., Denhière, G. The interaction between textual structures and prior knowledge: Hypotheses, data and simulations. Eur J Psychol Educ 16, 17–31 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03172992
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03172992