Between a rock and a hard place: Self-concept regulating and communicative properties of distancing behaviors.

Investigated 2 properties of distancing behaviors—a class of deliberate and inadvertent behaviors that insulate persons from the consequences of negative self-discrepant behavior and signal that they should not be associated with that behavior. In Phase 1, high-choice Ss in a multiple audience variation of the induced compliance paradigm who read counterattitudinal essays on affirmative action in the presence of a Black woman did not show typical dissonance-induced attitude change. Phase 2 found that this absence of attitude change was significantly related to the extent to which Ss distanced themselves from their essays before reading them. In Phase 3, distancing behaviors also served as discounting cues for naive observers and were significantly related to their ratings of Ss' attitudes. These results are discussed in terms of the self-regulatory and communicative roles of distancing behaviors in social interaction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Writing quality, reading skills, and domain knowledge as factors in text comprehension.

103 undergraduates listened to and recalled 3 passages and were given a general reading comprehension test. The passages were presented such that Ss could use general knowledge to understand them or such that no specific world knowledge seemed applicable. The passages were written in 2 different versions, preserving their content but varying their style. All 3 factors (domain knowledge, writing style, and skill) significantly affected reproductive recall, and there were no interactions between these factors. However, while good writing was sufficient to improve the reproduction of the texts, an analysis of the recall elaborations Ss made revealed that the correctness of their elaborations depended strongly on the availability of appropriate domain knowledge. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sensitivity to syntactic and semantic cues in good and poor comprehenders.

Fourth graders ( N = 48) who were equivalent on word recognition skills, but differed in comprehension ability, read sentences manipulated at the verb position to determine whether sensitivity to syntactic and semantic cues differs between good and poor comprehenders. Data in the form of oral reading errors at the verb position support the hypothesis that poor comprehenders are not affected by the disruptive effect of syntactic and semantic violations, while good comprehenders exhibit an increasing number of errors across semantic and syntactic/semantic violations. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individualizing a web-based structure strategy intervention for fifth graders' comprehension of nonfiction.

In the study, we investigated effects of 2 different versions of a web-based tutoring system to provide 5th-grade students with strategy instruction about text structure, which was an intervention to improve reading comprehension. The design feature assessed varied in individualization of instruction (individualized or standard). The more individually tailored version was developed to provide remediation or enrichment lessons matched to the individual needs of each student. Stratified random assignment was used to compare the effects of 2 versions of the 6-month web-based intervention. Students in the individualized condition made greater improvements from pretest to posttest on a standardized reading comprehension test (d = 0.55) than did students in the standard condition (d = 0.30). Students receiving more individualized instruction demonstrated higher mastery achievement goals when working in the lessons than did students receiving the standard instruction (d = 0.53). Students receiving more individualized instruction showed greater improvement in using signaling, better work in lessons, and more positive posttest attitudes toward computers than did students receiving standard instruction. Students in both conditions improved their recall of ideas from texts and their use of the text structure strategy and comparison signaling words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Episodically enhanced comprehension fluency.

Explored fluent reading comprehension in 6 experiments involving sentences presented in normal and inverted typography. 226 college students served as Ss. Sentences read in a test phase had been read earlier in exactly the same form or in versions that were created by altering the word order within sentences to create randomly ordered word strings or exchanging causally related clauses to form new meaningful sentences. Variation increased the time taken to read the test sentences, and these effects were evident over retention intervals ranging from 1 day to 4 mo. Results support an episodic view of the basis for rereading fluency in which comprehension processes responsible for constructing and integrating propositions are automatically recruited and reapplied when a sentence is reread. (French abstract) (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)     

Individual Differences in the Inference of Word Meanings From Context: The Influence of Reading Comprehension, Vocabulary Knowledge, and Memory Capacity.

Two studies investigated the ability to use contextual information in stories to infer the meanings of novel vocabulary by 9-10-year-olds with good and poor reading comprehension. Across studies, children with poor reading comprehension were impaired when the processing demands of the task were greatest. In Study 2, working memory capacity was related to performance, but short-term memory span and memory for the literal content of the text were not. Children with poor reading comprehension were not impaired in learning novel vocabulary taught through direct instruction, but children with both weak reading comprehension and vocabulary were. Implications for the relation between vocabulary development and text comprehension are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 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)     

Development of adolescent reading comprehension in language 1 and language 2: A longitudinal analysis of constituent components.

This study investigated the relationship between reading comprehension development of 389 adolescents in their dominant language (Language 1 [L1], Dutch) and a foreign language (Language 2 [L2], English). In each consecutive year from Grades 8 through 10, a number of measurements were taken. Students' reading comprehension, their linguistic knowledge (vocabulary and grammar knowledge) and processing efficiency (speed of word recognition and sentence comprehension) in both languages, and their metacognitive knowledge about reading were assessed. The relative strengths of the effects of these components of reading were analyzed to distinguish among 3 hypotheses about the relationship between L1 and L2 reading comprehension: the transfer hypothesis, the threshold hypothesis, and the processing efficiency hypothesis. The transfer hypothesis predicts a strong relationship between L1 and L2 reading comprehension and a strong effect of metacognitive knowledge on L2 reading comprehension, whereas the threshold and processing efficiency hypotheses predict a more important role of language-specific knowledge and processing skills. Results support the transfer hypothesis, although language-specific knowledge and fluency also contribute to L2 reading performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's elicited imitations of controlled and rewritten reading texts.

Elicited imitation was used to investigate suspected conflicts between the controlled language of beginning reading texts and the natural linguistic expectations of young children. Two stories from basal readers were presented orally, in either the controlled original versions or more natural rewritten versions, for 26 first graders to imitate, one segment at a time, in a between-groups design. Children who heard the rewritten versions received significantly higher ratings on reproduction of content in their imitations. The imitations from both groups were also analyzed with respect to reproduction of specific linguistic features on which the original and rewritten versions differed. These analyses showed that, consistent with the rewriting, children were significantly more inclined to delete unmotivated repetitions than to add them, and to consolidate or conjoin simple sentences than to break up more complex ones. Additional data on story recall and on responses to comprehension questions provide further support for the conclusion that the unnatural language used in controlled reading texts contribute to the difficulties young children have in reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Working memory and aphasia

This study investigated the relationship between working memory capacity and reading comprehension in aphasia. A measurement of working memory capacity was obtained using a modified version of Daneman and Carpenter's (1980) Reading Span Task. Sets of sentences ranging in length from one to six words were presented to 22 aphasic subjects who were required to retain the terminal words following each sentence for subsequent recognition. The maximum number of words retrieved was used as an index of working memory capacity. Two versions of the task (listening and reading) were presented depending on the subjects' ability to read. Strong positive correlations were found between working memory capacity, reading comprehension, and language function. These results support the notion that the ability of aphasic individuals to comprehend language is predictable from their working memory capacities.     

Relationship of Morphology and Other Language Skills to Literacy Skills in At-Risk Second-Grade Readers and At-Risk Fourth-Grade Writers.

Structural equation modeling evaluated the contribution of phonological, orthographic, morphological, and oral vocabulary factors to word reading, spelling, and reading comprehension outcomes in 98 2nd graders at risk for passing state standards in reading and to those same outcomes plus composing in 97 4th graders at risk for passing state standards in writing. For 2nd-grade children, morphology contributed uniquely to reading comprehension, and oral vocabulary and orthography contributed uniquely to word reading. For 4th-grade children, morphology and oral vocabulary did not contribute uniquely to any outcomes, but morphology and word reading were correlated, and orthography and phonology contributed uniquely to decoding words with affixes. Fourth graders are still learning to coordinate orthographic, phonological, and morphological cues in written words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's Reading Comprehension Ability: Concurrent Prediction by Working Memory, Verbal Ability, and Component Skills.

The authors report data from a longitudinal study that addresses the relations between working memory capacity and reading comprehension skills in children aged 8, 9, and 11 years. At each time point, the authors assessed children's reading ability, vocabulary and verbal skills, performance on 2 working memory assessments (sentence-span and digit working memory), and component skills of comprehension. At each time point, working memory and component skills of comprehension (inference making, comprehension monitoring, story structure knowledge) predicted unique variance in reading comprehension after word reading ability and vocabulary and verbal ability controls. Further analyses revealed that the relations between reading comprehension and both inference making and comprehension monitoring were not wholly mediated by working memory. Rather, these component skills explained their own unique variance in reading comprehension. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of introductions and conclusions in assessment of student essays.

Teachers and authors of guides to student writing, particularly writing of an informative or argumentative genre, stress the importance of the introductory and concluding sections in an essay. Within a discourse-processing framework, introductions and conclusions represent rhetorical structures that affect comprehension of the text. However, there is little documented empirical evidence of how, and to what degree, the introduction and conclusion affect the grade given to an essay. In this experimental study, undergraduate students graded essays in which the quality of the introduction or conclusion was varied while the main body of the essay remained intact. The quality of the introduction had a greater effect on the grade awarded than did the quality of the conclusion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Improvement in reading rate under independent and difficult text levels: Influences on word and comprehension skills.

Improving reading rate can be difficult for poor readers. In this experiment, we investigated the impact of improvement in reading rate on other aspects of reading, including word recognition, decoding, vocabulary, and comprehension. Poor readers in Grades 2 or 4 (N = 123) were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 conditions: practice reading text at their independent reading level (92%–100% word reading accuracy), practice reading text at a difficult reading level (80%–90% accuracy), or an untreated control. Students in practice conditions read aloud to an adult listener who assisted with difficult words. Before, midway, and following 20 weeks of treatment, we assessed improvement in reading rate, word recognition, decoding, vocabulary, and comprehension across conditions and determined the impact of improved rate on comprehension. We found significant differences favoring the treatment groups in rate, word recognition, and comprehension, but not in decoding or vocabulary. We found no significant differences in growth between levels of text difficulty. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effect of organizational cues and strategies on good and poor comprehenders' story understanding.

In two experiments, we investigated the influence of organizational cues on story comprehension by 7- to 8-year-old children, matched in age and decoding skills but differing in comprehension ability. In Experiment 1, children read abstract stories with titles and pictures that did or did not integrate story information. Providing integrative cues improved comprehension by poor, but not good comprehenders, but had no effect on verbatim recall. Both skill groups recalled more main ideas than subsidiary ones. In Experiment 2, two new groups read the stories without pictures or titles. Poor comprehenders trained to look for "clue words" to infer main story consequences, implicit in the stories, showed better comprehension than such children given no training. Good comprehenders performed at a uniformly high level regardless of training. The results are discussed in terms of cognitive control required to select and coordinate information in text. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Early first-language reading and spelling skills predict later second-language reading and spelling skills.

This prospective study examined early first-language (L1) predictors of later second-language (L2) reading (word decoding, comprehension) and spelling skills by conducting a series of multiple regressions. Measures of L1 word decoding, spelling, reading comprehension, phonological awareness, receptive vocabulary, and listening comprehension administered in the 1st through 5th grades were used as predictors of L2 reading (word decoding, comprehension) and spelling skills in high school. The best predictor of L2 decoding skill was a measure of L1 decoding, and the best predictors of L2 spelling were L1 spelling and L1 phonological awareness. The best predictor of L2 reading comprehension was a measure of L1 reading comprehension. When L2 word decoding skill replaced L1 word decoding as a predictor variable for L2 reading comprehension, results showed that L2 word decoding was an important predictor of L2 reading comprehension. The findings suggest that even several years after students learn to read and spell their L1, word decoding, spelling, and reading comprehension skills transfer from L1 to L2. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Recognition of Interlingual Homophones in Bilingual Auditory Word Recognition.

How do bilinguals recognize interlingual homophones? In a gating study, word identification and language membership decisions by Dutch-English bilinguals were delayed for interlingual homophones relative to monolingual controls. At the same time, participant judgments were sensitive to subphonemic cues. These findings suggest that auditory lexical access is language nonselective but is sensitive to language-specific characteristics of the input. In 2 cross-modal priming experiments, visual lexical decision times were shortest for monolingual controls preceded by their auditory equivalents. Response times to interlingual homophones accompanied by their corresponding auditory English or Dutch counterparts were also shorter than in unrelated conditions. However, they were longer than in the related monolingual control conditions, providing evidence for online competition of the 2 near-homophonic representations. Experiment 3 suggested that participants used sublexical cues to differentiate the 2 versions of a homophone after language nonselective access. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The computer as a zone of proximal development: Internalizing reading-related metacognitions from a Reading Partner.

We hypothesized that computer tools that provide models, opportunity for higher level thinking, and metacognitivelike guidance (e.g., "Can I conjure up an image of the story?") can serve in a learner's zone of proximal development (L. S. Vygotsky, 1978); they can develop competencies through internalization. A computerized Reading Partner presented four reading principles and metacognitivelike questions during the reading of 11 texts over three reading sessions. It was compared with one version that presented the texts with factual and inferential questions and a control version that presented only the texts. Seventh graders using the Reading Partner (n?=?25) reported the expenditure of more mental effort in the process, showed far better metacognitive reconstruction, and improved significantly more in their later reading comprehension and in the quality of their written essays than did the subjects in the other groups. Improvements in reading and writing were statistically accounted for by subjects' ability for metacognitive reconstruction. The study reinforces previous findings pertaining to the role of metacognitions in reading and shows that well-designed computer tools can cultivate competence. (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)