Lexical ambiguity resolution in good and poor comprehenders: An eye fixation and self-paced reading study in primary school children.

To investigate the use of context and monitoring of comprehension in lexical ambiguity resolution in children, the authors asked 10- to 12-year-old good and poor comprehenders to read sentences consisting of 2 clauses, 1 containing the ambiguous word and the other the disambiguating information. The order of the clauses was reversed so that disambiguating information either preceded or followed the ambiguous word. Context use and comprehension monitoring were examined by measuring eye fixations (Experiment 1) and self-paced reading times (Experiment 2) on the ambiguous word and disambiguating region. The results of Experiment 1 and 2 showed that poor comprehenders made use of prior context to facilitate lexical ambiguity resolution as effectively as good comprehenders but that they monitored their comprehension less effectively than good comprehenders. Good comprehenders corrected an initial interpretation error on an ambiguous word and restored comprehension once they encountered the disambiguating region. Poor comprehenders failed to deal with this type of comprehension failure. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inferential questioning: Effects on comprehension of narrative texts as a function of grade and timing.

In this study, we investigated the effects of inferential questioning, and of the timing of such questioning, on narrative comprehension by 4th-, 7th-, and 10th-grade students and college students. Students received questions either during or after reading simple narrative texts. Control groups read the texts without questions. Questioning, particularly during reading, interfered with the youngest students' recall both of text information in general and of information specifically targeted by the questions. Questioning facilitated college students' memory but only for information specifically targeted by the questions and only when questioning occurred during reading. As reading and language skills become more proficient and automatic, inferential questioning increasingly directs readers' attention during reading to the information targeted by the questions. In addition, inferential questioning challenges the processing capacities of younger or less skilled readers and, hence, may interfere with comprehension. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Developing fluent text processing with practice: Memorial influences on fluency and comprehension.

A great deal of research has examined predictors related to the development of reading fluency and reading comprehension. Whilst a number of studies support the relationship between the development of reading fluency and subsequent improvements in reading comprehension, many studies have shown faster and more accurate decoding does not automatically lead to better comprehension. Often overlooked is the role of the text representation that is encoded in memory during reading and its influence on skilled reading comprehension. In this article, the authors review literature that explores the relationship between text representation and fluent reading. Based upon the results of this review, the authors suggest that the type of representation formed during reading is closely related to the development of both skilled reading comprehension and fluent reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Morphological awareness: A key to understanding poor reading comprehension in English.

This longitudinal study examined the performance of poor comprehenders on several reading-related abilities in the late elementary school years. We identified 3 groups of readers in Grade 5 who were matched on word reading accuracy and speed, nonverbal cognitive ability, and age: unexpected poor comprehenders, expected average comprehenders, and unexpected good comprehenders. We compared these groups in Grade 5 and, retrospectively, in Grade 3. The 3 groups performed similarly on phonological awareness, naming speed, and orthographic processing tasks but differed in morphological awareness, even when vocabulary was controlled statistically. Unexpected poor comprehenders performed more poorly than expected average comprehenders in morphological derivation at Grade 5 but not in Grade 3; in contrast, expected average comprehenders performed more poorly than unexpected good comprehenders at Grade 3, but these groups did not differ in Grade 5. Our findings suggest that poor morphological awareness contributes to reading comprehension difficulties and that children with different reading comprehension profiles may learn morphology at different rates. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Text comprehension in Chinese children: Relative contribution of verbal working memory, pseudoword reading, rapid automated naming, and onset-rime phonological segmentation.

The present study examined the role of verbal working memory (memory span, tongue twister), 2-character Chinese pseudoword reading, rapid automatized naming (letters, numbers), and phonological segmentation (deletion of rimes and onsets) in inferential text comprehension in Chinese in 518 Chinese children in Hong Kong in Grades 3 to 5. It was hypothesized that verbal working memory, together with a small contribution from the other constructs, would explain individual variation in the children's text comprehension. Structural equation modeling and hierarchical multiple regression analyses generally upheld the hypotheses. Though Chinese pseudoword reading did not play an important mediating role in the effect of verbal working memory on text comprehension, verbal working memory had strong effects on pseudoword reading and text comprehension. The findings on the Chinese language support current Western literature as well as display the differential role of the constructs in Chinese reading comprehension. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reading skill as a source of individual differences in the processing of instructional texts.

Evidence was found in support of the hypothesis that skilled readers are more likely than less skilled readers to successfully retrieve an appropriate procedure by reading an instructional text. Subjects completed a standardized reading comprehension test and a test designed to reflect their processing of an instructional text and an example. The instructional text and the example either described the same procedure for answering test items (no conflict) or described different and mutually exclusive procedures (conflict). Subjects who had higher scores on the reading test were more likely to notice the conflict between the instructional text and the example, and those who noticed the conflict were more likely to use the instructional text. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

How does one know whether a person understands a device? The quality of the questions the person asks when the device breaks down.

Models of question asking predict that questions are asked when comprehenders experience cognitive disequilibrium, which is triggered by contradictions, anomalies, obstacles, salient contrasts, and uncertainty. Questions should emerge when a person studies a device (e.g., a lock) and encounters a breakdown scenario ("the key turns but the bolt doesn't move"). Participants read illustrated texts and breakdown scenarios, with instructions to ask questions or think aloud. Participants subsequently completed a device-comprehension test, and tests of cognitive ability and personality. Deep comprehenders did not ask more questions, but did generate a higher proportion of good questions about plausible faults that explained the breakdowns. An excellent litmus test of deep comprehension is the quality of questions asked when confronted with breakdown scenarios. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The impact of print exposure quality and inference construction on syllogistic reasoning.

This study extended the work of S. Siddiqui, R. F. West, and K. E. Stanovich (1998), who studied the link between general print exposure and syllogistic reasoning. It was hypothesized that exposure to certain text structures that contain well-delineated logical forms, such as popularized scientific texts, would be a better predictor of deductive reasoning skill than general print exposure, which is not sensitive to the quality of an individual's reading activity. Furthermore, it was predicted that the ability to generate explanatory bridging inferences while reading would also be predictive of syllogistic reasoning. Undergraduate students (N = 112) were tested for vocabulary, nonverbal cognitive ability, exposure to general print, exposure to popularized scientific literature, and the ability to comprehend texts distinguished by the number of inferences that must be generated to support comprehension. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed that a combined measure of exposure to general and scientific literature was a significant predictor of syllogistic reasoning ability. Additionally, the ability to comprehend high-inference-load texts was related to solving syllogisms that were inconsistent with world knowledge, indicating an overlap in deductive reasoning skill and text comprehension processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Depending on my mood: Mood-driven influences on text comprehension.

Reading comprehension is a critical component of success in educational settings. To date, research on text processing in educational and cognitive psychological domains has focused predominantly on cognitive influences on comprehension and, in particular, those influences that might be derived from particular tasks or strategies. However, there is growing interest in documenting the influences of emotional factors on the processes and products of text comprehension, because these factors are less likely to be associated with explicit reading strategies. The present study examines this issue by evaluating the degree to which mood can influence readers' processing of text. Participants in control, happy-induced, or sad-induced groups thought aloud while reading expository texts. Happy, sad, and neutral moods influenced the degree to which readers engaged in particular types of coherence-building processes in the service of comprehension. Although reading strategies clearly influence processing, understudied factors that are less explicitly goal-driven, such as mood, can similarly impact comprehension activity. These findings have important implications for the role of mood on reading instruction and evaluation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Training reading comprehension in adequate decoders/poor comprehenders: Verbal versus visual strategies.

Third through fifth grade adequate decoders who were poor comprehenders were trained for 10 weeks in either the verbally based reciprocal teaching (RT) program (n?=?22) or the visually based visualizing/verbalizing (V/V) program (n?=?23), or they were assigned to an untreated control group (n?=?14). Training reading comprehension strategies in small groups enhanced comprehension as the experimental groups made significant gains on 11 measures, whereas the untreated control group made only 1 significant gain. Between experimental group comparisons (yielding effect sizes?>?.32) favored the RT group on several measures that depend on explicit, factual material, while the V/V group was favored on several visually mediated measures. Regarding which experimental condition was statistically optimal, the RT group made only 1 significantly greater gain than the V/V group on answering text-explicit open-ended questions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reading skill and memory scanning.

Four experiments using a total of 48 3rd–4th graders investigated differences between skilled and less skilled readers in the rate with which they scan memory. In each experiment, Ss read 1–3 unrelated statements, then answered a yes–no question pertaining to 1 of the statements. The primary result from Exps I and II, in which Ss read all material aloud, was that skilled readers answered questions approximately .6 sec faster than less skilled readers when reading time was partialed out. In Exp III, similar results were found for silent reading. In Exp IV, the difference in answering time found in Exps I–III was no longer significant when the scan component in answering was minimized. (8 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Relationship between single word decoding and reading comprehension skill.

Conducted a study with 64 3rd and 5th graders from a predominantly White, working-class neighborhood. Ss classified as skilled and less skilled in reading comprehension, on the basis of their scores on the Reading Subtest of the Metropolitan Achievement Test, differed in vocalization latencies to single printed words. Overall, vocalization latencies were shorter for the skilled group than the less skilled group, and there was an interaction between word type and comprehension skill. Comprehension groups showed large vocalization latency differences for pseudowords and for low frequency English words but smaller differences for high frequency English words. Knowledge of word meanings may be a less significant factor in vocalization latency for the skilled group than for the unskilled group. It is suggested that at least some unskilled comprehenders may have failed to develop automatic decoding skills and that this failure may lead to diminished comprehension skills sharing a common processing capacity with nonautomatic decoding. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Segmentation in reading and film comprehension.

When reading a story or watching a film, comprehenders construct a series of representations in order to understand the events depicted. Discourse comprehension theories and a recent theory of perceptual event segmentation both suggest that comprehenders monitor situational features such as characters’ goals, to update these representations at natural boundaries in activity. However, the converging predictions of these theories had previously not been tested directly. Two studies provided evidence that changes in situational features such as characters, their locations, their interactions with objects, and their goals are related to the segmentation of events in both narrative texts and films. A 3rd study indicated that clauses with event boundaries are read more slowly than are other clauses and that changes in situational features partially mediate this relation. A final study suggested that the predictability of incoming information influences reading rate and possibly event segmentation. Taken together, these results suggest that processing situational changes during comprehension is an important determinant of how one segments ongoing activity into events and that this segmentation is related to the control of processing during reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Seeing, acting, understanding: Motor resonance in language comprehension.

Observing actions and understanding sentences about actions activates corresponding motor processes in the observer-comprehender. In 5 experiments, the authors addressed 2 novel questions regarding language-based motor resonance. The 1st question asks whether visual motion that is associated with an action produces motor resonance in sentence comprehension. The 2nd question asks whether motor resonance is modulated during sentence comprehension. The authors' experiments provide an affirmative response to both questions. A rotating visual stimulus affects both actual manual rotation and the comprehension of manual rotation sentences. Motor resonance is modulated by the linguistic input and is a rather immediate and localized phenomenon. The results are discussed in the context of theories of action observation and mental simulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Teaching readers about the structure of scientific text.

Adults may have difficulty in reading and retaining scientific text because they are unaware of the text's top-level structure. Experiment 1 revealed that college students had difficulty in sorting passages into categories on the basis of text structures, such as generalization, enumeration, sequence, classification, and compare/contrast. In Experiment 2, junior college chemistry students either received approximately 8 hr of training in how to discriminate among and use text structures found in their chemistry textbook (trained group) or engaged in unrelated activities (control group). All students took matched pretests and posttests in which they read biology passages and then freely recalled the passages and answered comprehension questions. On the recall test, the trained group showed a substantial pretest-to-posttest gain in recall of high conceptual information but not in recall of low conceptual information, whereas the control group showed no substantial gains. On the comprehension test, the trained group showed a substantial pretest-to-posttest gain in answering application questions and a lesser gain in answering literal questions, whereas the control group showed no substantial gains. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Word Learning and Individual Differences in Word Learning Reflected in Event-Related Potentials.

Adults learned the meanings of rare words (e.g., gloaming) and then made meaning judgments on pairs of words. The 1st word was a trained rare word, an untrained rare word, or an untrained familiar word. Event-related potentials distinguished trained rare words from both untrained rare and familiar words, first at 140 ms and again at 400-600 ms after onset of the 1st word. These results may point to an episodic memory effect. The 2nd word produced an N400 that distinguished trained and familiar word pairs that were related in meaning from unrelated word pairs. Skilled comprehenders learned more words than less skilled comprehenders and showed a stronger episodic memory effect at 400-600 ms on the 1st word and a stronger N400 effect on the 2nd word. These results suggest that superior word learning among skilled comprehenders may arise from a stronger episodic trace that includes orthographic and meaning information and illustrate, how an episodic theory of word identification can explain reading skill. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The function of frame in the comprehension of scientific text.

Children (mean age?=?10 yrs and 1 mo) participated in an experiment to examine how knowledge of the problem frame (C. H. Frederiksen, 1986) affects the construction of the macrostructure (T. A. van Dijk and W. Kintsch, 1983) and enhances text comprehension. Groups of Ss were administered versions of text without annotation, with indication of the nodes of the frame, or with the macrostructure underlined. Ss read a text, wrote a summary, and answered comprehension questions. Performance of good comprehenders and good summarizers improved only when they were provided with macrostructure information. In contrast, poor comprehenders/summarizers benefited from all aids. The data demonstrate the positive role of frames in macrostructure construction and support the model developed by van Dijk and Kintsch. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive approaches to understanding reading: Implications for instructional practice.

Reviews psychological research on the nature of fluent reading, visual word recognition, and text comprehension. Issues considered include the nature of perceptual processes in reading, sources of individual differences, the interactions among cognitive processes in skilled reading, and the role of background knowledge in constructing the meaning of text. Studies with instructional implications are noted that may stimulate development of programs for enhancing particular skills such as vocabulary, word-recognition efficiency, and inference making. Progress toward the definition of a general model for reading is also considered. (46 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)