TY - JOUR
T1 - Gender differences in mental simulation during sentence and word processing
AU - Wassenburg, Stephanie I.
AU - de Koning, Bjorn B.
AU - de Vries, Meinou H.
AU - Boonstra, A. Marije
AU - van der Schoot, Menno
PY - 2017/8
Y1 - 2017/8
N2 - Text comprehension requires readers to mentally simulate the described situation by reactivating previously acquired sensory and motor information from (episodic) memory. Drawing upon research demonstrating gender differences, favouring girls, in tasks involving episodic memory retrieval, the present study explores whether gender differences exist in mental simulation in children (Grades 4 to 6). In Experiment 1, 99 children performed a sentence-picture verification task measuring mental simulation at sentence level. In Experiment 2, 97 children completed a lexical decision task in which imageability of words was manipulated to measure mental simulation at word level. Only for girls we found faster reaction times for matching versus mismatching sentence-picture pairs (Experiment 1) and high-imageability versus low-imageability words (Experiment 2). The results suggest that girls construct more coherent and vivid mental simulations than boys and rely more heavily on these representations. The results emphasize the importance of including gender into reading comprehension research.
AB - Text comprehension requires readers to mentally simulate the described situation by reactivating previously acquired sensory and motor information from (episodic) memory. Drawing upon research demonstrating gender differences, favouring girls, in tasks involving episodic memory retrieval, the present study explores whether gender differences exist in mental simulation in children (Grades 4 to 6). In Experiment 1, 99 children performed a sentence-picture verification task measuring mental simulation at sentence level. In Experiment 2, 97 children completed a lexical decision task in which imageability of words was manipulated to measure mental simulation at word level. Only for girls we found faster reaction times for matching versus mismatching sentence-picture pairs (Experiment 1) and high-imageability versus low-imageability words (Experiment 2). The results suggest that girls construct more coherent and vivid mental simulations than boys and rely more heavily on these representations. The results emphasize the importance of including gender into reading comprehension research.
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U2 - 10.1111/1467-9817.12066
DO - 10.1111/1467-9817.12066
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84951183561
SN - 0141-0423
VL - 40
SP - 274
EP - 296
JO - Journal of Research in Reading
JF - Journal of Research in Reading
IS - 3
ER -