The Nature of the Suppression Mechanism in Reading: Insights from an L1-L2 Comparison

According to the Structure Building Theory (Gernsbacher, 1990), comprehension is understood as a process of building mental representations. Gernsbacher and Faust (1991) suggested that central to this process is the general cognitive mechanism of suppression, the efficiency of which is responsible for individual differences in comprehension skill. Poor comprehenders have an inefficient suppression mechanism due to which they are unable to inhibit irrelevant information. This would cause shifting more often in structure building and constructing smaller and less coherent representational structures. The present paper argues that poor comprehenders’ difficulties in ignoring irrelevant information could reflect a more general problem of controlling information in working memory. Inefficient suppression could be due to inefficiency of some other processes, which drain resources e.g. inefficient decoding. The study reported here looked at suppression of contextually irrelevant meanings of homonyms in L1 vs. fluent L2 using Gernsbacher and Faust (1991) homonym task. The results suggest immediate meaning activation in both L1 and L2, but delayed suppression of irrelevant meanings in L2 with respect to L1. This could mean that suppression in L2 is compromised by less efficient processing elsewhere in the system, or by low quality of lexical representations.