Gender differences in mental simulation during sentence and word processing
Abstract
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. [Correction added on 13 June 2016, after first online publication: The affiliation of author “Björn B. de Koning” was previously wrong and has been corrected in this current version.]
Number of times cited: 2
- Björn B. de Koning, Lisanne T. Bos, Stephanie I. Wassenburg and Menno van der Schoot, Effects of a Reading Strategy Training Aimed at Improving Mental Simulation in Primary School Children, Educational Psychology Review, 29, 4, (869), (2017).
- Wei Luo, Thomas J. Smith, Kyle Whalley, Andrew Darling, Carol Ormand, Wei‐Chen Hung, Jui‐Ling Chiang, Jon Pelletier and Kirk Duffin, Earth surface modeling for education: How effective is it? Four semesters of classroom tests with WILSIM‐GC, British Journal of Educational Technology, , (2018).
