Evidence is presented that eye-movement patterns during reading distinguish costs associated with... more Evidence is presented that eye-movement patterns during reading distinguish costs associated with the syntactic processing of sentences from costs associated with relating sentence meaning to real world probabilities. Participants (N = 30) read matching sets of sentences that differed by a single word, making the sentence syntactically anomalous (but understandable), pragmatically anomalous, or non-anomalous. Syntactic and pragmatic anomaly each caused
This study is part of a broader project aimed at developing cognitive and neurocognitive profiles... more This study is part of a broader project aimed at developing cognitive and neurocognitive profiles of adolescent and young adult readers whose educational and occupational prospects are constrained by their limited literacy skills. We explore the relationships among reading-related abilities in participants ages 16 to 24 years spanning a wide range of reading ability. Two specific questions are addressed: (a) Does the simple view of reading capture all nonrandom variation in reading comprehension? (b) Does orally assessed vocabulary knowledge account for variance in reading comprehension, as predicted by the lexical quality hypothesis? A comprehensive battery of cognitive and educational tests was employed to assess phonological awareness, decoding, verbal working memory, listening comprehension, reading comprehension, word knowledge, and experience with print. In this heterogeneous sample, decoding ability clearly played an important role in reading comprehension. The simple view of...
All writing systems represent speech, providing a means for recording each word of a message. Thi... more All writing systems represent speech, providing a means for recording each word of a message. This is achieved by symbolizing the phonological forms of spoken words as well as information conveying grammar and meaning. Alphabetic systems represent the segmental phonology by providing symbols for individual consonants and vowels; some also convey morphological units. Other systems represent syllables (typically CVs) or morphosyllables. In all cases, learning to read requires a learner to discover the forms of language that writing encodes, drawing on metalinguistic abilities that are not needed for the acquisition of speech. Therefore, learning to read is harder and rarer than acquiring speech. Research reveals that skilled readers of every studied orthography access phonological language forms automatically and early in word reading. Although reading processes differ according to the cognitive demands of specific orthographic forms, the differences are subservient to the universal p...
... Crain ception. In this paper we take this for granted.' Our concern is with analysis of ... more ... Crain ception. In this paper we take this for granted.' Our concern is with analysis of the language deficiencies research has identified in poor readers, and with how these deficiencies affect the reading process. Our main goal ...
Recent studies have found considerable individual variation in language comprehenders' predic... more Recent studies have found considerable individual variation in language comprehenders' predictive behaviors, as revealed by their anticipatory eye movements during language comprehension. The current study investigated the relationship between these predictive behaviors and the language and literacy skills of a diverse, community-based sample of young adults. We found that rapid automatized naming (RAN) was a key determinant of comprehenders' prediction ability (e.g., as reflected in predictive eye movements to a white cake on hearing "The boy will eat the white…"). Simultaneously, comprehension-based measures predicted participants' ability to inhibit eye movements to objects that shared features with predictable referents but were implausible completions (e.g., as reflected in eye movements to a white but inedible white car). These findings suggest that the excitatory and inhibitory mechanisms that support prediction during language processing are closely lin...
ABSTRACT A central issue in the study of sentence processing is the manner in which various sourc... more ABSTRACT A central issue in the study of sentence processing is the manner in which various sources of information are used in resolving structural ambiguities. According to one proposal, the garden path model (e.g. Frazier & Rayner, 1982), perceivers are initially guided by strategies based solely on the structural properties of sentences. Another class of models, constraint satisfaction models, emphasise the influence of lexical properties in decisions among the alternative analyses of an ambiguous sentence fragment (e.g. Tanenhaus, Garnsey, & Boland,1991). In this paper, we explore the prediction of an alternative model, the referential theory (e.g. Crain &Steedman, 1985). The referential theory maintains that the relative complexity of discourse representations plays a key role in determining the perceiver's immediate parsing preferences. We present four experiments designed to weigh the influence of semantic/referential complexity and general world knowledge in the on-line resolution of two kinds of structurally ambiguous sentences. In eachexperiment,weexaminedpairsofsentencesthatwereidenticalexceptfor the alternation between the definite determiner THE and the focus operator ONLY. Two techniques were used to assess ambiguity resolution: word-byword reading and eye movement recording. The results indicate that semantic/referential principles are applied immediately in on-line ambiguity resolution and that these principles pre-empt general world knowledge. The use of world knowledge was found to depend on working memory capacity, whereas the resolution of ambiguity by means of semantic/referential principles appeared to be independent of memory resource. Taken together, the findings are interpreted as support for the referential theory of ambiguity resolution.
Page 1. D. Shankweiler and KS Harris An experimental approach to the problem of articulation in a... more Page 1. D. Shankweiler and KS Harris An experimental approach to the problem of articulation in aphasia Reprinted from CORTEX, Vol. II, 1966, pp. 277-292 LA TIPOGRAFICA VARESE Via Tonale 49, Varese (Italia) 1966 Page 2. ...
The coding of printed letters in a task of consonant recall was examined in relation to the level... more The coding of printed letters in a task of consonant recall was examined in relation to the level of success of prelingually and profoundly deaf children (median age 8.75 years) in beginning reading. As determined by recall errors, the deaf children who were classified as good readers appeared to use both speech and fingerspelling (manual) codes in short-term retention of printed letters. In contrast, deaf children classified as poor readers did not show influence of either of these linguistically based codes in recall. Thus, the success of deaf children in beginning reading, like that of hearing children, appears to be related to the ability to establish and make use of linguistically recoded representations of the language. Neither group showed evidence of dependence on visual cues for recall.
Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 1966
Patients with temporal-lobe lesions received 2 dichotic auditory tests, 1 consisting of melodies ... more Patients with temporal-lobe lesions received 2 dichotic auditory tests, 1 consisting of melodies and the other of digits. The relative efficiency with which dichotic input to the 2 ears is handled was shown to vary with the side of the lesion and the nature of the stimulus materials employed. Perception of dichotically presented melodies was selectively impaired by right temporal lobectomy whereas perception of dichotically presented digits was selectively impaired by left temporal lobectomy. Findings confirm indications of earlier studies in pointing to functional asymmetries of the 2 temporal lobes in man.
Gough and Tunmer's (1986)... more Gough and Tunmer's (1986) simple view of reading (SVR) proposed that reading comprehension (RC) is a function of language comprehension (LC) and word recognition/decoding. Braze et al. (2007) presented data suggesting an extension of the SVR in which knowledge of vocabulary (V) affected RC over and above the effects of LC. Tunmer and Chapman (2012) found a similar independent contribution of V to RC when the data were analyzed by hierarchical regression. However, additional analysis by factor analysis and structural equation modeling indicated that the effect of V on RC was, in fact, completely captured by LC itself and there was no need to posit a separate direct effect of V on RC. In the present study, we present new data from young adults with sub-optimal reading skill (N = 286). Latent variable and regression analyses support Gough and Tunmer's original proposal and the conclusions of Tunmer and Chapman that V can be considered a component of LC and not an independent contributor to RC.
Evidence is presented that eye-movement patterns during reading distinguish costs associated with... more Evidence is presented that eye-movement patterns during reading distinguish costs associated with the syntactic processing of sentences from costs associated with relating sentence meaning to real world probabilities. Participants (N = 30) read matching sets of sentences that differed by a single word, making the sentence syntactically anomalous (but understandable), pragmatically anomalous, or non-anomalous. Syntactic and pragmatic anomaly each caused
This study is part of a broader project aimed at developing cognitive and neurocognitive profiles... more This study is part of a broader project aimed at developing cognitive and neurocognitive profiles of adolescent and young adult readers whose educational and occupational prospects are constrained by their limited literacy skills. We explore the relationships among reading-related abilities in participants ages 16 to 24 years spanning a wide range of reading ability. Two specific questions are addressed: (a) Does the simple view of reading capture all nonrandom variation in reading comprehension? (b) Does orally assessed vocabulary knowledge account for variance in reading comprehension, as predicted by the lexical quality hypothesis? A comprehensive battery of cognitive and educational tests was employed to assess phonological awareness, decoding, verbal working memory, listening comprehension, reading comprehension, word knowledge, and experience with print. In this heterogeneous sample, decoding ability clearly played an important role in reading comprehension. The simple view of...
All writing systems represent speech, providing a means for recording each word of a message. Thi... more All writing systems represent speech, providing a means for recording each word of a message. This is achieved by symbolizing the phonological forms of spoken words as well as information conveying grammar and meaning. Alphabetic systems represent the segmental phonology by providing symbols for individual consonants and vowels; some also convey morphological units. Other systems represent syllables (typically CVs) or morphosyllables. In all cases, learning to read requires a learner to discover the forms of language that writing encodes, drawing on metalinguistic abilities that are not needed for the acquisition of speech. Therefore, learning to read is harder and rarer than acquiring speech. Research reveals that skilled readers of every studied orthography access phonological language forms automatically and early in word reading. Although reading processes differ according to the cognitive demands of specific orthographic forms, the differences are subservient to the universal p...
... Crain ception. In this paper we take this for granted.' Our concern is with analysis of ... more ... Crain ception. In this paper we take this for granted.' Our concern is with analysis of the language deficiencies research has identified in poor readers, and with how these deficiencies affect the reading process. Our main goal ...
Recent studies have found considerable individual variation in language comprehenders' predic... more Recent studies have found considerable individual variation in language comprehenders' predictive behaviors, as revealed by their anticipatory eye movements during language comprehension. The current study investigated the relationship between these predictive behaviors and the language and literacy skills of a diverse, community-based sample of young adults. We found that rapid automatized naming (RAN) was a key determinant of comprehenders' prediction ability (e.g., as reflected in predictive eye movements to a white cake on hearing "The boy will eat the white…"). Simultaneously, comprehension-based measures predicted participants' ability to inhibit eye movements to objects that shared features with predictable referents but were implausible completions (e.g., as reflected in eye movements to a white but inedible white car). These findings suggest that the excitatory and inhibitory mechanisms that support prediction during language processing are closely lin...
ABSTRACT A central issue in the study of sentence processing is the manner in which various sourc... more ABSTRACT A central issue in the study of sentence processing is the manner in which various sources of information are used in resolving structural ambiguities. According to one proposal, the garden path model (e.g. Frazier & Rayner, 1982), perceivers are initially guided by strategies based solely on the structural properties of sentences. Another class of models, constraint satisfaction models, emphasise the influence of lexical properties in decisions among the alternative analyses of an ambiguous sentence fragment (e.g. Tanenhaus, Garnsey, & Boland,1991). In this paper, we explore the prediction of an alternative model, the referential theory (e.g. Crain &Steedman, 1985). The referential theory maintains that the relative complexity of discourse representations plays a key role in determining the perceiver's immediate parsing preferences. We present four experiments designed to weigh the influence of semantic/referential complexity and general world knowledge in the on-line resolution of two kinds of structurally ambiguous sentences. In eachexperiment,weexaminedpairsofsentencesthatwereidenticalexceptfor the alternation between the definite determiner THE and the focus operator ONLY. Two techniques were used to assess ambiguity resolution: word-byword reading and eye movement recording. The results indicate that semantic/referential principles are applied immediately in on-line ambiguity resolution and that these principles pre-empt general world knowledge. The use of world knowledge was found to depend on working memory capacity, whereas the resolution of ambiguity by means of semantic/referential principles appeared to be independent of memory resource. Taken together, the findings are interpreted as support for the referential theory of ambiguity resolution.
Page 1. D. Shankweiler and KS Harris An experimental approach to the problem of articulation in a... more Page 1. D. Shankweiler and KS Harris An experimental approach to the problem of articulation in aphasia Reprinted from CORTEX, Vol. II, 1966, pp. 277-292 LA TIPOGRAFICA VARESE Via Tonale 49, Varese (Italia) 1966 Page 2. ...
The coding of printed letters in a task of consonant recall was examined in relation to the level... more The coding of printed letters in a task of consonant recall was examined in relation to the level of success of prelingually and profoundly deaf children (median age 8.75 years) in beginning reading. As determined by recall errors, the deaf children who were classified as good readers appeared to use both speech and fingerspelling (manual) codes in short-term retention of printed letters. In contrast, deaf children classified as poor readers did not show influence of either of these linguistically based codes in recall. Thus, the success of deaf children in beginning reading, like that of hearing children, appears to be related to the ability to establish and make use of linguistically recoded representations of the language. Neither group showed evidence of dependence on visual cues for recall.
Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 1966
Patients with temporal-lobe lesions received 2 dichotic auditory tests, 1 consisting of melodies ... more Patients with temporal-lobe lesions received 2 dichotic auditory tests, 1 consisting of melodies and the other of digits. The relative efficiency with which dichotic input to the 2 ears is handled was shown to vary with the side of the lesion and the nature of the stimulus materials employed. Perception of dichotically presented melodies was selectively impaired by right temporal lobectomy whereas perception of dichotically presented digits was selectively impaired by left temporal lobectomy. Findings confirm indications of earlier studies in pointing to functional asymmetries of the 2 temporal lobes in man.
Gough and Tunmer's (1986)... more Gough and Tunmer's (1986) simple view of reading (SVR) proposed that reading comprehension (RC) is a function of language comprehension (LC) and word recognition/decoding. Braze et al. (2007) presented data suggesting an extension of the SVR in which knowledge of vocabulary (V) affected RC over and above the effects of LC. Tunmer and Chapman (2012) found a similar independent contribution of V to RC when the data were analyzed by hierarchical regression. However, additional analysis by factor analysis and structural equation modeling indicated that the effect of V on RC was, in fact, completely captured by LC itself and there was no need to posit a separate direct effect of V on RC. In the present study, we present new data from young adults with sub-optimal reading skill (N = 286). Latent variable and regression analyses support Gough and Tunmer's original proposal and the conclusions of Tunmer and Chapman that V can be considered a component of LC and not an independent contributor to RC.
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