MACROSTRUCTURE IN TEXT-PROCESSING

Research into the effects of global conventional macrostructures of discourse on comprehension often was disturbing the objective logics of a story or taks by mixing up the paragraphs. It would be more informative to know whether different macrostructures of task-descriptions which are, however, not differring as to the logics of their subject matter, will produce differences in comprehension and performance, too. Therefore relational vs sequential descriptions are experimentally compared, using real-life tasks of different complexity and delay of accomplishment. No well-defined general differences were found. However, there are hints on an interaction between the type of task description and task complexity favouring the sequential one in case of high complexity.