Semantic reading deficits in young adults: lack of conceptual thinking

The paper describes the results of a series of qualitative studies on comprehension of metaphoric meanings of verbal texts by young healthy adults. Using stimuli of various genres (fables, jokes, short story, science education text) we showed that despite high IQ and education levels the majority of participants failed to reconstruct meanings of the texts. Namely, they struggled with: 1) formulating core ideas of the text; 2) differentiating important semantic features of the text from unimportant ones; 3) rewording the core ideas of the text with no distortion of their meanings; 4) building up the text’s cognitive representation; 5) putting together the information explicitly described in the text and use it to deduce new knowledge; 6) reading traditional cultural codes; 7) providing metacognitive control under their own subjective projections. All these difficulties indicate pre-conceptual stage of cognitive development and might be overcome through developing of conceptual thinking skills. We also discuss educational practices that supposedly contribute to the abovementioned difficulties: lack of semantic reading training in primary school, non-systematised presentation of information and prevalence of visual forms of communication, and early digitalization of education leading to the increase of cognitive load while reading.