Less skilled comprehenders’ ERPs show sluggish word-to-text integration processes

We examined the word-to-text integration processes of less skilled comprehenders using ERPs recorded during text reading. The first sentence of each text controlled the accessibility of an antecedent referent for a critical word, which was the first content word of the second sentence. In the explicit condition, the critical word had occurred in the first sentence; in the paraphrase condition, a word or phrase similar in meaning had occurred in the first sentence; in the inference condition, a referent could have been established during the first sentence only if the reader made a forward inference; a baseline condition provided no obvious antecedent for the critical word. PCA, topographic results, and mean amplitude analyses converged on a picture of integration difficulty. Integration effects emerged in the expected mid-latency ranges for the explicit and inference conditions. The pattern of effects differed from that of skilled comprehenders, who, in another study, showed earlier integration effects for explicit and paraphrase conditions, but not reliably for the inference condition. Paraphrase effects were especially weak and late occurring for less skilled comprehenders. Compared with skilled comprehenders, less skilled comprehenders show slow word-to-text integration processes.