Psychological differentiation and use of syntactic and semantic cues in reading comprehension.

Abstract

An attempt was made to relate Smith's psycholinguistic theory of reading and Witkin's theory of psychological differentiation to determine if the use of syntactic and semantic cues in reading is related to one's extent of field-dependence. It was hypothesized that FI subjects would make more use of syntactic and semantic cues than would FD subjects. The Sophistication of Body Concept Scale and experimenter designed paper-and-pencil adaptions of Miller's disruptive effect technique, composed of a "Woodpecker Test" and a "Groundhog Test", were used to measure the interaction of the two variables. The scores of 158 grade four subjects were used to determine the reliability of the reading tests. The scores of 119 subjects identified as FI (N = 47) and FD (N = 72) were analyzed by a repeated measures analysis of variance. Differences were found to be in the direction hypothesized, but statistically non-significant at the .05 level. Significant differences were noted, however, in reading scores between the FI and FD groups and between scores on non-disrupted and disrupted reading material. The failure to reject the null hypothesis was attributed to limitations in the measuring devices used and suggestions were made for replication.