Abstract
The present study investigated the effects of a graph on undergraduates' comprehension of an expository text. In Experiment 1, undergraduates who knew little about the domain of the text read 1 of 3 versions of a text concerning digitization which contained either a line graph representing an example of digitization (Graph Group), a verbal description of the example (Verbal Description Group), or no example (Control Group). The Graph Group performed better than the other 2 groups on a transfer test that required deep understanding, but did not have significantly better scores on retention of the text. The results suggest that a graph would be more likely than verbal description to enable readers to build a situation model. Futhermore, in Experiment 2, readers who received a text that had verbal description adding more information from the graph did not perform as well as Graph Group. These findings suggest that the Graph Groups benefited from information in the graph when they built the situation model, whereas, because of the cognitive burden, the Verbal Description Group could not use the verbal description well enough to enable them to elaborate a representation.
