Abstract
Rhetoric Competence. A proposal to interpret comprehension difficulties. This work assesses the impact that Rhetoric Competence-the ability to operate with the mechanisms that provide coherence to a text- has on text comprehension. Specifically, we take into account the ability to operate with two different text mechanisms: logical connectives and anaphoric devices. This way, we try to provide a broad communicative interpretation to the comprehension problems felt by many readers: the difficulty to interpret the purpose and ideas of an author or speaker from the signals used in his / her message, signals that become more complex when we shift from oral to written communication. In this last kind of communication, rhetoric competence comes to play a more important role. Results confirm the importance of rhetoric competence in the comprehension process and its specific weight in relation to other variables: previous knowledge, word recognition and working-memory The direction of the relation between rhetoric competence and comprehension is yet to be determined.
