Effects of Vocabulary Difficulty, Text Cohesion, and Schema Availability on Reading Comprehension

Two experiments assessed the effects of text cohesion and schema availability on children's comprehension of social studies passages that varied in vocabulary difficulty. Free recall, summarization, and sentence verfication measures were used. In the first experiment, texts were prepared which varied in cohesion. No interactions between cohesion and vocabulary difficulty appeared, although main effects for vocabulary were found. In the second experiment, schema availability was manipulated by varying topic familiarity. Significant main effects for familiarity and vocabulary difficulty were found; however, the two factors did not interact. The results of the two experiments failed to support expectations based on an interactive theory of reading.