Fifth Grade Readers' Comprehension of Explicit and Implicit Connective Propositions

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Abstract
Because many writers eliminate explicit connective words in order to reduce syntactic complexity and thereby increase comprehensibility, these studies were designed to investigate the effects of this elimination on reading comprehension. Sixty-four fifth graders of average reading ability each participated in one of two experiments. The explicitness of “because” in each of three experimental passages was manipulated in Experiment I by stating it explicitly in one version and implicitly in the other; in Experiment II, the explicitness of “after” was similarly manipulated. On the basis of current research in the area of discourse comprehension, it was predicted that the groups reading the passages in which the connectives were removed from the surface structure would recognize fewer of the connective concepts and recall fewer of the connected ideas than would the groups reading the passages in which the connective concepts were explicitly stated. The results indicated that the subjects did not generally comprehend the causal relationships regardless of their explicitness or implicitness and that they did generally comprehend the time-sequence relationships regardless of their explicitness or implicitness. Limited support was found for the hypothesis that the recall of a connective would be associated with a higher level of recall of the connected ideas.

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