When text difficulty benefits less-skilled readers

The mnemonic effects of increased text difficulty were examined for skilled and less skilled college readers for fairy tales and expository texts. One difficulty manipulation was designed to encourage relational processing of the ideas in the text and the other was designed to encourage more controlled processing of individual text elements (words). Replicating past studies, skilled readers, as indexed either by Nelson-Denny tests or Gernsbacher (1990) structure-building tests, showed no disruption in recall by either difficulty manipulation; indeed their recall was enhanced for certain combinations of difficulty manipulation and text type. Less skilled Nelson-Denny readers but not less skilled structure builders showed consistent declines in recall after they performed the difficult task that challenged word processing. In contrast, the difficult task that promoted encoding of relational information improved recall for both types of less skilled readers. This complex pattern is inconsistent with two straightforward views of how difficulty might affect text memory for less able readers. The results instead suggest that selective deficiency and processing enhancement are both important in text difficulty effects.