ABSTRACT
We looked at whether placing important words in boldface affects comprehension. In two experiments, participants read passages and timed themselves, answered multiple-choice comprehension questions, and produced recall summaries. Highlighting important words produced worse performance on comprehension questions, reading times, meaningful units recalled, and meaningful units recalled per unit reading time than did highlighting all words or no words. Similar patterns of results were found when participants were specifically instructed that the highlighted words were important as when they were not so instructed. These results are explained by the proposal that providing important words leads participants to do less active processing of the passage and leads them to ignore function words that are essential for appreciating syntactic structure.
