A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Reading Comprehension

Abstract

Subjects from the United States and India read letters about an Indian and an American wedding and recalled them following interpolated tasks.Subjects read the native passage more rapidly, recalled a larger amount of information from the native passage, produced more culturally appropriate elaborations of the native passage, and produced more culturally based distortions of the foreign passage.Whether recalling the native or foreign passage, subjects recalled more of the text elements rated as important by other subjects with the same cultural heritage.The results were interpreted as showing the pervasive influence on comprehension and memory of schemata embodying knowledge of the content of a discourse.