Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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).