OBJECTIVES 1 Main Objective

To investigate whether high school students who present different EFL reading proficiency and working memory capacity scores, show corresponding differences in their ability to infer meaning from cartoons. 1.3.2 Specific Objectives

1. To obtain participants’ EFL reading proficiency scores by means of answers to questions about relevant information in expository non- illustrated texts;

2. To obtain participants’ WMC scores by means of the Reading Span Test (RST);

3. To obtain participants’ EFL reading comprehension scores by means of questions about the main ideas of a cartoon;

4. To examine the correlation between the scores described in specific objectives ‘1’ and ‘2’;

5. To analyse the relationships between the scores described in specific objectives ‘1’ and ‘3’, as well as in specific objectives ‘2’ and ‘3’. 1.4 HYPOTHESES

Assuming a considerable influence of EFL reading proficiency and WMC in the inferential comprehension of illustrated texts, the following set of hypotheses is raised:

 Hypothesis 1 (H1):

There is a positive correlation between EFL reading proficiency as measured by means of answers to questions about important information presented in expository non-illustrated texts, and WMC as measured by means of the Reading Span Test. That is, readers who obtain higher EFL reading proficiency measures are also those who obtain higher WM span measures.

 Hypothesis 2 (H2):

There is a positive relationship between EFL reading proficiency, as measured by means of answers to questions about important information presented in non-illustrated expository texts, and the inferential comprehension of cartoons, as measured by means of answers to questions about the relationships between their verbal and pictorial

information. That is, more proficient readers2 are more able to infer meaning to texts presented in more than one code, in this study, in the verbal and pictorial codes.

 Hypothesis 3 (H3):

There is a positive relationship between WMC, as measured by means of the Reading Span Test, and the inferential comprehension of cartoons, as measured by means of answers to questions about the relationships between their verbal and pictorial information. That is, higher spans are more able to infer meanings from texts presented in more than one code, in this study, in the verbal and pictorial codes.

The first hypothesis might be related to the aphorism “rich get richer”. It suggests that there will be a positive correlation between EFL reading proficiency and WMC. According to Daneman and Carpenter (1980), more proficient readers are more efficient in comprehending texts, a fact that results in less consumption of the available WMC. For these readers, lower reading subprocesses such as lexical access and parsing, for instance, may be performed automatically. On the other hand, less proficient readers may require more of the processing capacity to perform these same minimal computations. Then, readers may perform differently in the very same language tasks because their reading proficiency will impose different demands on WM, whose processing efficiency varies from individual to individual. Therefore, it is suggested that the participants of this study who will obtain higher EFL reading proficiency measures will be those who will also obtain higher WM span measures.

As stated by Gagné et al. (1993), skillful reading involves the automatization of low-level reading processes (i.e. decoding and literal comprehension). Thus, as inferential comprehension is considered a higher level reading process whose achievement depends on the good execution of lower level reading subprocesses (Tomitch, 2012), H2 suggests that more proficient readers will be more able to construct

2 _{Although hypothesis 2 was theoretically grounded on Gagné et al. (1993), this} researcher opted for the terms ‘less proficient readers’ and ‘more proficient readers’, instead of ‘less skilled readers’ and ‘more skilled readers’, as found in the originals of this group, as an attempt to harmonize the lexicon used in this text with lexica used in previous studies who have somehow established the use of the first terms to refer to EFL reading, and of the second one, to L1 reading, which was the case of Gagné and colleagues.

relationships between verbal and pictorial information not literally expressed on the surface of the text, than will be less proficient readers. As a result of this construction, they will perform better at comprehending implicit ideas found beyond the surface of cartoons than will less proficient readers.

With regard to H3, Just and Carpenter (1992) state that “individuals vary in the amount of activation that they have available for meeting the computational and storage demands of language processing” (p.124). In their view of capacity limitation in language processing, individuals have a limited budget of activation in WM that can be allocated flexibly. As explained by Logie (1996), “once all of the available activation has been allocated, any new processing can be accomplished only by reducing the level of activation somewhere else” (p.36). The implication of that in the processing of cartoons, under this view, is that low budgets of activation would consequently hinder their inferential comprehension. That is, since the comprehension of these texts depends on the construction of relationships between verbal and pictorial information not literally expressed on the surface of the text, the reader has to count on enough cognitive resources to go beyond literal comprehension. If s/he counts on few resources, s/he may be limited to the processing of lower level reading subprocesses and then, be unable to construct deeper relationships among them. Thus, in H3 it is suggested that higher spans will be more able to effectively keep activated the information needed to reach an inferential comprehension of cartoons than will be lower spans.