Steffensen and Joag-Dev (1984) examined the influence of cultural knowledge on
reading comprehension. The participants consisted of 20 Indians and 20 Americans. The
two groups read two different texts: American wedding and Indian wedding. Then they
all were assigned to recall the two texts. The results revealed that cultural background
knowledge was a factor affecting the participants’ reading comprehension. Readers can
comprehend the text when they process the schemata