When text difficulty benefits less-skilled readers

The mnemonic effects of increased text difficulty ere examined for skilled and less skilled college readers for fairy tales and expository texts, One difficulty manipulation was designed to encourage relational processing of the ideas in the text and the other was designed to encourage more controlled processing of individual text elements (words). Replicating past studies. skilled readers, Lis indexed either by Nekon-Denny test,,, or Gernsbacher ( 1990) structure-building, tests, showed no disruption fit recall by either difficulty manipulation: indeed their recall A as enhanced for certain combinations of difficulty manipulation and text type Less killed Nelson-Denny readers but not less skilled structure builders showed consistent declines in recall after they performed the difficult task that challenged word processing, In contrast, the difficult task that promoted encoding of relational information improved recall for both types of less skilled readers. This complex pattern is inconsistent with two straightforward views of how difficulty might affect test memory for less able readers. The results instead suggest that Selective deficiency and processing enhancement are both important in text difficulty effects. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).