| The phenomenon that reading aloud is better than reading silently is called the "production effect" in the memorization of materials.According to previous studies,the production effect is stable when single experimental materials such as words,word pairs,and sentences are used,but when the experimental materials involve text reading,the effect of reading aloud or silent reading on reading comprehension varies greatly.Previous studies only explored the reading comprehension of primary and middle school students in different reading modes without distinguishing between the memorized and comprehension parts of the text,and the results were not comprehensive enough.Compared with elementary and middle school students,college students’ cognitive developmental abilities and curriculum content have changed significantly,and as they grow older,silent reading becomes dominant in individual reading activities.Therefore,present study wanted to investigate whether there is a production effect in both memory tests and comprehension tests in short text reading for the college student population.That is to say,present study wanted to investigate the effect of reading mode on reading memory performance and comprehension performance for different genres of texts.Experiment 1 conducted a 2(genre: expository and narrative)× 2(reading mode:read aloud and silent)within-subjects experimental design in which each subject read a total of four texts—that is,one narrative and one expository text aloud,and one narrative and one expository text silently.During the reading process,the number of readings was controlled,that is,subjects were asked to read each article aloud or silently only once.The results showed that when the article reading times was consistent,a stable production effect was found in the memory test,while the main effect of reading mode in the comprehension test was not significant.However,the interaction between reading mode and test genre was significant,with reading aloud outperforming silent reading in the memory test and silent reading outperforming reading aloud in the comprehension test.Experiment 2 changed the control article reading times in Experiment 1 to control the total time of article reading to ensure that the processing time between reading the article aloud and silent was consistent,and the other experimental processes were the same as in Experiment 1.The results showed that when the reading processing time was consistent,the correct rates of reading aloud and silent were found to be comparable in the memory test,but the reaction time of reading aloud was significantly faster than that of silent reading.None of the main effects of reading mode in the comprehension test were significant,but the interaction between reading mode and text genre was found to be significant in the comprehension test,with reading aloud slower than silent reading for narrative texts and faster than silent reading for expository texts.The interaction between reading mode and test type was significant,with faster reaction times for reading aloud than silent reading in the memory test and faster reaction times for silent reading than silent reading in the comprehension test.Experiment 3 was changed to unlimited reading,but the reading time of the subjects was recorded.Considering the effect of reading ability on individual reading articles,this experiment divided the subjects into high and low reading span groups on a reading span test to explore the reading performance of individuals with different reading abilities in reading mode and article genre,and the other experimental processes were consistent with Experiment 1.The results showed that low reading span subjects benefited from reading aloud only in the memory test,and high reading span subjects did not differ in either reading mode in the memory test and comprehension test.In summary,the present study showed that(1)Reading ability affects production effects,with low low reading ability group benefiting from reading aloud on memory tests;(2)memory benefited more from reading aloud and comprehension benefited more from silent reading;(3)when the reading processing time was consistent,reading aloud is better than silent reading in explanatory text,while narrative is the opposite. |
