The purpose of this paper is to compare the results of adults' performances in cued-recall and recognition of expository texts with the results of simulations derived from the construction- integration model proposed by Kintsch (1988. 1990). In the cued recall task, we manipulated three parameters: the weights of the connexions in the net, the size of the short-term memory buffer and the representations of the sentence used as a cue. The main results show that w e need to simulate the macroprocessing and the priw knowlegde of the learners to be able to increase the simulations. In the recognition task, w e simulate the representation of 4 levels (surface syntactic variation, close semantic variation, inference and distant semantic variationreferring to the same situation model than the text) using different connexion weights function the decay of the memory trace. The main results show the necessity to take into account these levels to explain the subjects' cognitive processes involved in a comprehension/memcM-ization task. For both experiments, the activation values obtained cOTTectly fitthe hierarchy of the experimental data.

Many experimental studies have shown that learning and memorization of complex information are strongly influenced by the learners' prior knowledge. Thus, detailed analyses of the structures and the processes involved in learning and memorization require precise assessment of the leamer's prior knowledge in relation to the characteristics of the domain to be acquired. W e have developed a formalization in terms of systems: relational, transformational, teleological (functional and intentional) which permits us to simultaneously describe that domain being acquired, the representaion of the acquiring organism, and our representation of that representation. Here, we will report a study in which this formalization was employed in assessing the representation that students with different levels of knowledge about automobile mechanics have of a functional system: the starter system of an automobile. The predictions made by this formalization were compared with the performances of three groups of students with different levels of knowledge on a series of four tasks: free interview, causal questioning, completing lacunary event triples, and a multiple choice questionaire on the existence of events and causal relations. The criterium used to choose these four tasks was that they differ according to the demands they make in the retrieval of stored information in memory. The results show that: (i) subjects with a good level of knowledge have a representation organized in a fuctional autonomous system organized in sub-systems, while (ii) subjects with lower levels of knowledge do not have a representation organized as a functional system, and (iii) subjects from the intermediate group built a representation organized as a functional autonomous system but containing less information and more poorly organized in sub-systems.

This paper investigates the relationship readers with different levels of prior knowledge construct among procedural text elements, specifically, among the goal, the actions and the outcome of a procedural text. Readers were either beginners, intermediates, or experts in using a particular software. Our hypothesis was that the main difference between the prior knowledge organization of beginner, intermediate, and advanced subjects was due to the relationship among a goal, the necessary actions to attain this goal, and the obtained outcome. An experiment using a primed recognition task with the goal as prime and both the outcome and the actions as targets confirmed this hypothesis. The primed recognition results were simulated with the Construction-Integration model of comprehension (Kintsch, 1998).