TEXT COHERENCE AND MULTIMEDIA COMPREHENSION
Lucia Lumbelli, Gisella Paoletti, Maurizio Boscarol
Dept. of Psychology ‘Gaetano Kanizsa’, University of Trieste
Abstract. We investigated the effect of an intervention on text coherence on understanding of
a multimedia presentation on lightening formation already used in many investigations
(Mayer, 2001). We predicted that by explicitly stating the consequential connections between
information items in the written text component, recall would be improved. We presented
therefore two versions of an informative and explicative text accompanied by static pictures:
in the original version information items were listed in a chiefly unconnected way, with only
few cohesion elements and frequently implied consequential connections (i.e. frequent
requests for connective inference); in the revised version the connections between information
items were explicitly stated and the inferences requested made explicit as well. Two groups of
17 participants matched on a standardized reading comprehension test scores examined on a
computer screen one of the two different versions of the multimedia. The recall of participants
that examined the revised text was found to be significantly higher than the other group’s one.