The influence of language proficiency and comprehension skill on situation‐model construction

Abstract

This study examines the influence of language proficiency and comprehension skill on situation‐model construction during narrative comprehension. Twelve college students who were enrolled in a third‐semester French course thought aloud during the comprehension of English and French stories. After each text, the students performed a verb‐clustering task. Scores on these two tasks indicate that the students generated more explanatory inferences in English than in French, and constructed stronger situation models in English than in French. In addition, skilled comprehenders generated more explanatory inferences and stronger situation models than less skilled comprehenders. The implications of these findings for current theories of text comprehension and individual differences are discussed.