Ibáñez, A. 1 , Gómez-Ariza, C. 2 & Carreiras, M. 1
1 Basque Center on Cognition Brain and Language (bcbl)
2 Universidad de Jaén
Many studies have shown that inhibition in memory is crucial for reading comprehension (e.g., Pimpertom, 2010). Friedman and Miyake (2004) revealed two additional factors, resistance of interference and inhibition of response. The focus of the current study is to investigate the relationship between language comprehension and resistance to interference. This type of inhibition is defined as the capacity to extract relevant information from a given stimulus or event, and suppress the features that are not important for processing. These features can be part of the stimulus itself or surrounding properties of the context, in which the stimulus is immersed. In our study, we compared good and poor readers in their ability to suppress irrelevant information in a visual word presentation task. Lexical, phonological, and semantic features of target words in successive trials were manipulated in a letter case identification task. Participants had to decide the type of letter case in which the stimuli were presented (e.g., caballo vs. CABALLO). For example, we compared the decision on a word (e.g., caballo), based on the previous presentation of orthographic neighbors (e.g., cabello), rhyming related (e.g., lacayo), semantically related (e.g., jinete) or an unrelated control words (e.g., maceta). Results showed that good and poor comprehenders differed in their capacity to resist interference that derived from lexical and semantic information. We discuss these results from a perspective of suppression of irrelevant information mechanisms needed for reading comprehension.