Abstract

This study was conducted to investigate the effect of individual differences in working memory on goal inference processes in narrative comprehension. In correlational study, it was found that reading span score correlated word span score, but there was no significant relationship between Korean verbal SAT score and both types of span scores. In Experimental study, the interaction effect between reading span and text structure (goal-success vs goal-failure) was examined. It was found that there was no significant difference between high and low span readers when the distance between the goal and the and probe was near in Experiment 1. However, Experiment 2, which the probe was separated far from the goal, indicated that high span readers recognized the superordinate goal faster in the goal-failure structure than in the goal-success structure whereas low span readers did not differ in both types of text structure. The results suggest that high span readers construct integrative representation during reading whereas low span readers have some difficulties in constructing coherent representation, only when working memory loads are heavy.