Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Gernsbacher (e.g., 1990) has proposed that comprehension skill is a function of the ability to suppress inappropriate or irrelevant information. This hypothesis is based on the finding that the inappropriate meaning of an ambiguous word loses activation for skilled comprehenders after a delay, but remains activated and slows comprehension for less-skilled comprehenders. It is hypothesized here that comprehension skill is not due to the suppression of information, but rather is enhanced by the activation of more knowledge. Simulations based on the Construction-Integration model of comprehension (Kintsch, 1988) show that the activation of more knowledge leads to an initial activation of an inappropriate meaning of a concept which quickly decays Without the activation of the knowledge, the inappropriate meaning remains activated. This account thus predicts and explains Gernsbacher's empirical data.