The Impact Of Word Association Knowledge And Text Structure On Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension is a complex process. Many factors contribute to proper reading comprehension. Recognizing that no single component can account for all the variance in performance on a complex task such as reading, some researchers have administered a battery of perceptual, cognitive, and linguistic tasks to determine the relative amounts of variance in reading ability uniquely associated with each component process.Many researches have been done on vocabulary width or vocabulary size. Vocabulary depth has not got its due attention. In my thesis two factors-word association knowledge and text structure knowledge-were examined to see their impact on reading comprehension. In this paper the impact of word association knowledge on reading comprehension were studied. The text structure is also a part of my research topic. I found that vocabulary size, word association knowledge and text structure all have significant impact on reading comprehension. Among the three factors, the impact of word association knowledge is the great. The analysis is based on data from the experiment, the word knowledge framework theory, and the schema theory. We can also find a good explanation from information processing.