Word-recognition skills of adults with childhood diagnoses of dyslexia.

This study investigated whether the same pattern of reading deficits that characterize dyslexic children continue to characterize this population as it reaches adulthood. Standardized and experimental reading tasks were administered to college students with childhood diagnoses of dyslexia, and to age-matched and reading-matched control subjects. Despite relatively high levels of reading comprehension, dyslexics showed inaccurate and particularly slow word-recognition skills. Dyslexics did not use age-appropriate, and in some cases reading-level-appropriate word recognition processes. They relied heavily on the use of spelling–sound information, syllabic information, and context for word recognition. Word-recognition difficulties reflected poor knowledge of spelling–sound correspondences. Adult dyslexics' patterns of performance were most similar to those of beginning skilled readers and to dyslexic children. The term arrest rather than deviance or delay best characterizes the word-recognition skills of adult dyslexics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Recall of thematically relevant material by adolescent good and poor readers as a function of written versus oral presentation.

36 7th grade good and poor readers read one prose passage and listened to a 2nd one. They were tested, following each passage, for comprehension and recall of that passage. Under both reading and listening conditions, good readers recalled a greater proportion of the stories, and the likelihood of their recalling a particular unit was a clear function of the units's structural importance; poor readers recalled less of the stories, and their recall protocols were not as clearly related to variations in structural importance. Performance following reading was significantly correlated with performance following listening. Results indicate that poor readers suffer from a general comprehension deficit and that similar processes are involved in reading and listening comprehension. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Differences in literal and inferential comprehension after reading orally and silently.

Investigated whether (1) there are differences in reading comprehension related to test format (oral vs silent reading of a passage), (2) differences occur equally with literal and inferential questions, and (3) the differences occur equally for good and poor readers. 94 children in Grades 2–5 were asked to read, orally and silently, grade-appropriate passages from the Analytic Reading Inventory. Questions were classified as literal or inferential. A repeated measures ANOVA showed no direct effects attributable to test format (whether the S read orally or silently) or kinds of comprehension (whether the S answered literal or inferential questions) but did show several interaction effects at different levels of competence. Results fail to support common assumptions regarding the greater ease of silent over oral reading or literal over inferential comprehension for poor readers but do support contentions of deficits in automaticity and attentional focus in poor readers. (38 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of phonology in the activation of word meanings during reading: Evidence from proofreading and eye movements.

Six experiments explored the role of phonology in the activation of word meanings when words were embedded in meaningful texts. Specifically, the studies examined whether participants detected the substitution of a homophone mate for a contextually appropriate homophone. The frequency of the incorrect homophone, the frequency of the correct homophone, and the predictability of the correct homophone were manipulated. Also, the impact of reading skill was examined. When correct homophones were not predictable and participants had a range of reading abilities, the evidence indicated that phonology plays a role in activating the meanings of low-frequency words only. When the performance of good and poor readers was examined separately, the evidence indicated that good readers primarily activate the meanings of words using the direct route, whereas poor readers primarily activate the meanings of words using the phonological route. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reading ability and use of a story schema in recalling and reconstructing information.

Examined the differences between 48 good and 48 poor 6th-grade readers' use of a story schema in recall and reconstruction tasks. Ss heard a story either in canonical (standard) or interleaved (a form of scrambling) format and were instructed to recall the story and reconstruct the order of story events either directly as they heard it or as it should be. Performance in the reconstruction and recall tasks showed that both good and poor readers could use a story schema when the story followed canonical format; however poor readers' story schema was either not as well-developed or as efficiently used. Both recall and reconstruction data provided evidence that schematic retrieval is not obligatory for either type of reader. Good readers could use a story schema when cued to do so in any task, but poor readers could do so only in the reconstruction task. Differential improvement of poor readers' performance relative to that of good readers' in a 2nd phase of the experiment due to previous experience in the 1st phase was obtained only in the reconstruction task. Conclusions support the view that poor readers perform differently from younger normal children. (41 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effect of genre expectations on text comprehension.

This article investigates whether expectations about discourse genre influence the process and products of text comprehension. Ss read texts either with a literary story or with a news story as the purported genre. Subsequently, they verified statements pertaining to the texts. Two experiments demonstrated that Ss reading under a literary perspective had longer reading times, better memory for surface information, and a poorer memory for situational information than those reading under a news perspective. Regression analyses of reading times produced findings that were consistent with the memory data. The results support the notion that readers differentially allocate their processing resources according to their expectations about the genre of a text. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Generative processes in reading comprehension.

In M. C. Wittrock's (1974) generative model of learning with understanding, reading comprehension occurs when readers actively construct meaning for text. Two experiments were conducted with a total of 488 6th graders, in which time to learn was held constant across all treatments. It was predicted and found that the facilitation of generative processes by the insertion of paragraph headings and instructions to generate sentences about story paragraphs during encoding produced the greatest comprehension, followed in turn by instructions to generate sentences, the insertion of paragraph headings, and then by reading the same stories without generative instructions or paragraph headings. The combination of inserted paragraph headings and instructions to generate sentences about paragraphs approximately doubled comprehension and recall in each experiment. (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)     

Children's understanding in reading and listening.

Children's understanding was assessed after they read or listened to brief texts that described a scene, explained a sequence of events, or told a story. Data were obtained in a developmental study of 157 2nd–6th graders and in a study of 150 5th graders. The data indicate that effectiveness in understanding depends on the fluency with which component processes of perceptual recognition, comprehension, and memory are coordinated. The understanding of novice readers, who recognized a printed text accurately but laboriously, was poorer than their understanding of a comparable spoken text. In skilled readers, a similar loss of understanding occurred when accurate recognition was accomplished at a fast pace. When skilled readers listened to a text that they could simultaneously read, their understanding was better than when they read orally. These findings interacted with text content, some materials being associated with the findings concerning both loss and improvement of understanding and other materials being associated with neither. (29 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Understanding Chinese prose: Effects of number of ideas, metaphor, and advance organizer on comprehension.

Examined the degree to which student performance in constructing macrostructures in Chinese prose is affected by 3 text structures—number of ideas, metaphoric expressions, and advance organizers. 485 Hong Kong Chinese students in the 7th grade and 514 in the 10th grade were randomly assigned to 88 groups, with each group reading 4 texts of the same version and then completing an idea-ordering test for each text. When texts with more and fewer ideas were compared, results favored the latter, thus confirming the prediction that coherent structure would facilitate macroprocessing. Replacement of literal expressions with metaphoric ones did not influence idea organization. Text with an advance organizer resulted in distracting effects for both good and poor readers. Interaction effects were not significant among the 3 factors. Findings suggest that T. A. van Dijk and W. Kintsch's (1983) model of text comprehension is applicable in cross-language research. Sample texts and the idea-ordering test are appended. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attention, unpredictability, and reports of physical symptoms: Eliminating the benefits of predictability.

Conducted 3 experiments with 135 undergraduates to investigate the established finding from the unpredictability literature that exposure to unpredictable noise leads to reports of more severe physical symptoms than does exposure to predictable noise. In Exp I, Ss performed a reaction time (RT) task while they listened to loud bursts of either predictable or unpredictable noise. As expected, RTs were slower when the noise was unpredictable than when it was not. This finding suggests that more attention had been directed to the unpredictable than the predictable noise. In Exp II and III, Ss were exposed to either predictable or unpredictable noise and were instructed to attend to the noise or were given no instructions. In both cases, Ss not instructed to attend to the noise reported more severe symptoms when the noise was unpredictable than when it was not, thus replicating the previous finding. Of greater interest, however, was the fact that equating the amount of attention directed to the unpredictable and predictable noise (by asking Ss to attend to the noise) eliminated the apparent benefits of predictability. (32 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Metacognitive differences between skilled and less skilled readers: Remediating deficits through story grammar and attribution training.

Designed a metacognitive intervention program to remediate the failures of 42 4th-grade boys in using metacognitive skills to aid their reading comprehension. The program consisted of 2 components: story grammar training, designed to increase comprehension monitoring; and attribution training, designed to increase awareness of effort in efficient reading. Ss were assigned to 3 groups: 1 group received both components and the other 2 groups each received one component alone. 14 skilled 4th-grade male readers served as a contrast group. Maintenance was assessed through free and probed recall; generalization was assessed through a metareading test and an error detection and correction task. Results indicate that strategy training produced dramatic gains in comprehension. Only Ss receiving attribution training alone showed poorer performance than skilled readers. Partial support was obtained for generalization on the metareading assessment. It is concluded that strategy training improved poor readers' comprehension by providing them with metacognitive skills. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Resilient readers? University students who are poor recoders but sometimes good text comprehenders.

The authors screened 194 university students to determine whether some could comprehend text well despite very poor recoding skills, measured by pseudoword reading. Most of the 17 poorest recoders had never been identified as reading disabled. We classified 6 poor recoders as "resilient readers" because their text comprehension scores were average or above, relative to the sample as a whole. They were indistinguishable from 6 matched typical readers on measures of text comprehension derived from oral-reading think-aloud protocols. There was no evidence that the resilient readers relied on superior verbal ability or working memory to compensate for poor recoding. The resilient readers were poor at spelling, reading isolated words, and reading text rapidly, but they showed adequate phonemic awareness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Development of components of reading skill.

Verbal coding efficiency and listening comprehension ability were assessed in 100 skilled and less skilled readers in 2nd, 3rd, and 5th grades. Younger and less skilled readers differed from older skilled readers on both factors. However, as verbal coding speed increased, comprehension skill became the more important predictor of reading skill. Results are interpreted within a limited processing capacity model of reading. Verbal coding processes, which are slow, reduce the amount of attention available for other reading processes, thereby producing deficits in comprehension of what is read. (30 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Quick, automatic, and general activation of orthographic and phonological representations in young readers

Second through 6th graders were presented with nonword primes (orthographic, pseudohomophone, and control) and target words displayed for durations (30 and 60 ms) that were brief enough to prevent complete processing. Word reading skills were assessed by 3 word and nonword naming tasks. Good readers exhibited more orthographic priming than poor readers at both durations and more pseudohomophone priming at the short duration only. This suggests that good readers activate letter and phonemic information more efficiently than poor readers. Good readers also exhibited an equal amount of priming at both durations, whereas poor readers showed greater priming at the longer duration. This suggests that activation was not under strategic control. Finally, priming was reliable for both high- and low-frequency targets. This suggests that readers activate consistent information regardless of target word characteristics. Thus, quick, automatic, and general activation of orthographic and phonological information in skilled readers results from the precision and redundancy of their lexical representations.     

Measuring the inference load of a text.

Readability formulas are criticized because they do not consider the contributions of the readers' background or expertise and ignore the meaning and content of texts. A new approach is proposed based on the analysis of texts as causally connected chains of actions, physical states, and mental states. A formula for measuring the inference load of texts is presented which uses multiple regression techniques. The inference load of texts reflects the difficulty readers have in inferring the causal connections necessary to recover the event chains underlying the texts. Using the inference load formula, the difficulty of texts can be adjusted for readers differing in skill or knowledge. (43 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Resource allocation during the rereading of scientific texts

Two experiments examined how cognitive resources are allocated to comprehension processes across two readings of the same scientific texts. In Experiment 1, readers read and later reread texts describing scientific topics. The results indicated that across readings, readers decreased resources allocated to proposition assembly, increased resources allocated to text-level integration, and expended a similar amount of resources to lexical access. Subjects who reread the texts after a week delay showed a similar pattern, except that they did not show the increase for text-level integration. Experiment 2 revealed a similar pattern of results with a moving window procedure, except that there was a significant decrease in resources allocated to lexical access across exposures. This experiment also indicated that the rereading speedup was greatest at sentence boundaries, suggesting that the prior exposure enabled readers to immediately process each word. Overall, the results are consistent with the claim that readers allocate proportionally more available resources to text-level integration during rereading because proposition assembly, which enables text-level integration, can be completed with fewer resources.     

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)     

The basis of test predictions for text material.

Investigated the relationship between test predictions and test performance for text material. Ss predicted test performance or made judgments about ease of comprehension both before and after reading short expository texts. As Ss gained more information about texts, the correlations between predictions and performance increased. Generally, test predictions were better predictors of test performance than were ease of comprehension ratings. Exps 2 and 3 showed that Ss use domain familiarity in their test predictions, but this declines from before to after reading. Increased accuracy of test predictions from before to after reading was interpreted as indicating that Ss use specific information gained from reading texts to make accurate predictions about their future test performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)