This study explores the effect of prior discipline-related knowledge in reading comprehension for two groups of students of Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL). The first group (G1), had 22 students enrolled in a general Spanish course and the second (G2), had 18 students enrolled in a course of Spanish for medical professions. The aim was to…

According to most theories of text comprehension, readers construct and store in memory at least two inter-related representations: a text base containing the explicit ideas in a text and a discourse model that contains the overall meaning or "gist" of a text. The authors propose a refinement of this view in which text representations are…

Readers construct at least 2 interrelated mental representations when they comprehend a text: a textbase and a situation model. Two experiments were conducted with recognition memory to examine how domain knowledge and text coherence influence readers' textbase and situation-model representations. In Experiment 1, participants made remember-know…