Abstract: Based on Multi-Media Language Comprehension Test, two groups of subjects who were high-and low-skilled Chinese comprehenders were selected for this investigation. Two experiments were conducted to test the inhibition mechanism of the two groups of subjects in processing Chinese two-character words and two-clause sentences. An experimental paradigm combining force-paced Moving Window and probe recognition task was used. The subjects were required to read the word sequences or sentences in which some irrelevant double-character words or pseudo-words were inserted as distractors. Each group of words or sentence was followed by a probe recognition task. The results showed: Inhibition was influenced by the meaningfulness of the distractors. The more meaningful distractors were more difficult to be inhibited. Low-skilled comprehenders inhibited less efficiently the distracting information during lexical and sentence comprehension. So, less skilled comprehenders suffered from a less efficient inhibition mechanism, which we suggest is an important component of language comprehension skill.

Key words: language comprehension skill, inhibition mechanism, distractors, meaningfulness