Sami Gülgöz, Fatoş Gökşen, & Çiğdem Kağıtçıbaşı Literacy Is More Than Learning To Read: Information Retention From TV News Sami Gülgöz, Fatoş Gökşen, & Çiğdem Kağıtçıbaşı Koç University sgulgoz@ku.edu.tr Introduction The aim of the current study was to investigate the indirect discourse processing gains from literacy training. We argue that learning to read initiates a chain reaction of changes in the cognitive processing system. While societies prior to literacy has been dependent upon oral traditions for both personal and public memories (Rubin, 1995), writing alleviated the pressure on cognitive resources of individuals. Nevertheless, Olson (1996) claims the effect is much more significant than that. As people become readers, they lose their ability to represent language in any other form than the form provided by the model of written language. Learning to read and write is a series of discoveries; discovery of the phonemic units, words, grammatical form, and sentence meaning (Olson, 1996). Therefore, with the introduction of written language, the representations of language become a representation that is largely different from the representation generated by oral language. One type of change has been observed in the laterality of the brain. Lecours, Mehler, Parente and others (1988) have shown in their comparison of literates with illiterates that the left hemisphere dominance of language representation was more pronounced among schooled subjects. In the current study, we investigated the recall of information from TV news presented before and after attendance to a literacy training course. The news that was presented varied in type (soft or hard news), scope (local, national, or international) and coherence (low - original or high - revised). Fig. 1 Topic Recall and Content Recall Before and After Training Fig. 2 Topic Recall of Original and Revised News Texts Before and After Training Fig.3 Content Recall of Original and Revised News Texts Before and After Training Method The participants were 65 women with ages ranging between 17 and 65 with no ability to read or write. They were attending a literacy course. The news used in the study were created by making modifications on real news and were recorded professionally in a TV studio. The scope and type of news were orthogonally varied, and consequently, there were six types of news with two examples of each. The news were recorded twice. The news story recorded as the original low coherence version in one recording was recorded as the revised high coherence version in the other recording. There were an equal number of original and revised stories in each recording. In both recordings, the news stories were read by the same person without any visual effects. The participants were presented the news program first and then they were approached by interviewers. The interviewers asked the participants to recall first the topics of the news and then the contents. The procedure was repeated at the end of the literacy course, three months later. Results and Conclusion In order to test for any carry-over effect from previous viewing of the news, we compared the topic recall of the participants with those who were present only in the second presentation of the news and this comparison showed no difference. The analyses of topic recall and content recall indicated that the participants remembered more of the topics discussed in the news and a greater amount of the content of the news after the training than before (Fig. 1). Version of the news story had an effect on recall of news topics such that the version revised for higher coherence was remembered better than the original version. This result was qualified by the interaction of version with the time of testing such that before training, there was no difference between versions but after training there was a significant difference favoring the revised version (Fig. 2). The results of the content recall was similar such that the revised version is recalled better overall but the interaction shows the difference to be greater after the training (Fig. 3). Finally, the analyses on news type and news scope revealed that topic recall increased after the training in all news types and scopes (Fig. 4). The interactions showed that the effect of training is most pronounced in local soft news and national and international hard news. The recall of content also showed a consistent increase in recall of all news types as a result of training (Fig. 5). The improvement in the ability to recall from TV news as a result of literacy training may be a function of multiple causes. One possible cause is that literacy training introduces a wholly new way of encoding language and this new way facilitates encoding and memory of spoken text as in news stories. The observation that the participants are also better able to remember coherent text supports that such changes occur. Another possible explanation is that literacy training indirectly affected the knowledge base of the participants with the ability to read the newspapers and a larger knowledge base enabled improved memory of news stories. This explanation is supported by the finding that memory improvements happen in particular types of news that demonstrated low levels of recall prior to literacy training. Fig. 4 Topic Recall of News Texts Before and After Training According to News Type and Scope Fig. 5 Content Recall of News Texts Before and After Training According to News Type and Scope