• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.487-515
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• 2012

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of the individual differences in cognitive processes on paragraph comprehension. To do so, the lexical decision task and the pattern comparison task were used to measure the low-level cognitive processes. Digit span task was used to test the phonological loop capacity. The individual differences of the central executive processing capacity were measured by operational span task. Reading span task was used to test the working memory capacity related with the sentence processing. Reading times and accuracies of the logically valid inferences and logically void inferences were tested to measure the high-level cognitive processes. Reading times and accuracies for the target sentences with and without prior explicit causal sentence were measured to test individuals' paragraph comprehension abilities. The results showed that the speed of the low-level cognitive processes was related with the speed of the high-level cognitive processes. Also, the accuracy of the low-level cognitive processes was related with the accuracy of the high-level cognitive processes while there was no significant correlation between the speed and the accuracy in any measures of the cognitive processes. Working memory capacity was related with the accuracy of the cognitive processes while it was not significantly correlated with the speed of the cognitive processes. Most importantly, the speed of low-level cognitive processes significantly affected the speed of the paragraph comprehension while the working memory capacity and the high-level cognitive processes had influences on the accuracies of the paragraph comprehension. The speed of the paragraph comprehension had no influence on the accuracies of the paragraph comprehension.