Dupont, V., & Bestgen, Y. (1999). The role of structural preview on expository text processing. In A. Maes, H. Hoeken, L. Noordman, & W. Spooren (Eds.), Document design. Linking writers' goals to readers' needs. Tilburg: Tilburg University.

Dupont, V.; Bestgen, Y.

1999

Dupont, V., & Bestgen, Y. (1999). The role of structural preview on expository text processing. In A. Maes, H. Hoeken, L. Noordman, & W. Spooren (Eds.), Document design. Linking writers' goals to readers' needs. Tilburg: Tilburg University.

studie 2

It is usually recommended to start a text by providing readers with an overview of its content (the topics discussed) and of its structure (the relations between the topics). However, in a recent study, Murray and McGlone (1997) reported that readers benefit from topic information but not from structural information provided in an introductory paragraph. In the present experiments, the authors ask whether these conclusions generalize to more complex texts, in which structural information is more important. Two experiments, using a text with a complex hierarchical structure, replicated previous results on reading times. Experiment 2 also permitted to rule out the effect of numerical signals in the text as signals in the text as the sourse of this result. Moreover, recall was not affected by information provided in the overview.

On overall recall, there was no effect of the overview, but an effect of type of information recalled. Topic information is better recalled than other information. Participants seemed to be influenced by topic information during reading, not by structure information.

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