Summarizing stories after reading and listening

48 college students either listened to or read 3 tape-recorded stories, each about 2,000 words in length. Immediately after processing each story, Ss wrote a summary in 60-80 words. A comparison of the summaries written after reading with those written after listening revealed only minor differences. Ss tended to include a little more idiosyncratic detail in their summaries after listening than after reading, but the shared content of the summaries remained remarkably unchanged. It is concluded that these results can aid in the identification of the common core of comprehension processes that underlie both listening and skilled reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).