Seventy good readers and 70 poor readers who were students at a community college participated in a study that examined the role of adversative connectives in helping students integrate information across sentence boundaries. Three functions of adversative connectives were examined: contrast or conflict, parallel points, and foregrounding information. The reading instrument consisted of 10 paragraphs of comparison-contrast taken from the "World Book Encyclopedia." In one version, the connectives appeared in the text as they did in the "World Book," while in the manipulated version, they were deleted. One general question requiring the integration of pre- and postconnective material followed each paragraph. The writing instrument consisted of information in outline form, presenting a comparison-contrast. Directions instructed students to transform the outline into a paragraph, including all the information given and adding whatever words were necessary to communicate the information as clearly as possible. Test results showed that (1) adversative connectives aided poor readers' ability to exclude irrelevant information, (2) connectives that functioned to foreground information improved good readers' performance, and (3) poor readers who read the test version with connectives included more connectives in their written responses than poor readers who read the test version without connectives. (HOD)