Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Individuals are frequently presented with information that must be integrated across multiple sources. The current study ex- plores the role of self-explanation strategies in supporting across-text integration during multiple document comprehen- sion. Participants (n=139) read a multiple document text set, while either self-explaining or thinking aloud, then com- pleted verification questions (sentence and inference verifica- tion), a prior knowledge test, and an essay task. Results demonstrated that participants with higher prior knowledge outperformed those with lower knowledge across comprehen- sion assessments. Critically, self-explanation was associated with higher performance on across-text inference verification items, with no corresponding effect for within-text inferences. Computational linguistic analyses revealed that self-explanation was associated with increased cohesion in readers' constructed responses across lexical, semantic, and connective-based in- dices. Together, these findings suggest that self-explanation promotes integration during multiple-document comprehension by strengthening inferential coherence-building mechanisms, and that across-text integration represents a key challenge that benefits from strategic instructional support.