ABSTRACT
We compare the effects of interrupting text dealing with familiar or unfamiliar domains with either arithmetic or sentence reading tasks. Readers were interrupted after each of the eight sentences, at the end of each sentence, or in the middle of each sentence. Previous findings of minimal effects of interruptive tasks on comprehension measures (e.g., Glanzer & Nolan, 1986) were replicated in this study. Also, as found by Glanzer and his colleagues, interruptions after each sentence of a familiar text by an unrelated sentence increased reading times by approximately 400 ms per sentence. In contrast, for difficult, unfamiliar texts, mid-sentence interruptions significantly lengthened reading times by 1262 ms for sentence and 1784 ms for arithmetic interruptions. These findings are explained in terms of Hricsson and Kintsch's (1995) memory model which proposes that skilled memory performance relies on the use of long-term memory as an extension of working memory, or long-term working memory.
