Abstract: The activation and integration models of text information in reading were explored for good and poor readers in the study. Three experiments were conducted. Inconsistent paradigm was used in Experiment 1 to examine whether good and poor readers could maintain global and local coherence. The results showed that poor readers couldn’t maintain global coherence. Probe-verification paradigm was used in Experiment 2 to investigate the reason why poor readers could not maintain global coherence. The probe sentences were either located after the protagonist’s characteristics description, or after filler passage, or after target action. By comparing the reaction time to probe sentences in the three locations, it could be concluded that whether it was because of activation or integration. The results indicated that, just like good readers, poor readers could activate the information in long-term memory. It implied that the reason why poor readers could not maintain global coherence was not that they could not activate previous information, but might be that they had difficulty in integrating the information. Experiment 3 further confirmed that the reason was that poor readers had difficulty in integrating the activated information with new information.

Key words: global coherence, local coherence, activation, integration, poor readers