Keyword and context instruction of new vocabulary meanings: Effects on text comprehension and memory.

New vocabulary was taught by one of three methods: keyword, semantic context, and no-strategy control. The semantic context method involved presenting subjects verbal contexts from which they might infer the meanings of the words, followed by explicit provision of the definitions. After a vocabulary definition acquisition phase, subjects in all conditions read a text in which some of the newly acquired vocabulary was embedded, with half of the texts providing richer contextual clues to the meaning of the target items (embellished text) than the other texts (unembellished text). Reading times did not differ as a function of acquisition condition, nor did one acquisition condition consistently elicit better performance than the others across text comprehension/memory measures. The one significant difference in comprehension favored the keyword method. The usual superiority of the keyword method for recall of definitions given vocabulary items was also replicated. Despite theoretically motivated concerns that keyword-method acquisition of definitions might inhibit comprehension of vocabulary in discourse relative to a semantic context method, none of the reaction time (RT) or performance analyses reported here supported those hypotheses. A subsidiary finding was that test text embellishments increased comprehension (as indexed by recall measures), a result suggesting that certain kinds of contextual support can enhance comprehension of "new" vocabulary. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Embedding reading comprehension training in content-area instruction.

This study evaluated the effectiveness of comprehension training embedded in a program that taught science content to 2nd graders. The program included instruction about the structure of compare-contrast expository text, emphasizing clue words, generic questions, graphic organizers, and the close analysis of well-structured text exemplars. This program was compared with a program that focused on the science content but included no compare-contrast training as well as with a no-instruction control. Regular classroom teachers (14 from 4 schools), randomly assigned to treatment, provided the instruction; 215 students (7-8 years old) participated. The study replicated acquisition and transfer effects found in an earlier study, that is, transfer to compare-contrast text with content related and unrelated to the instructional content (with no loss in the amount of science content acquired). The program also led to better performance on written and oral response measures and on 1 of the 2 measures involving authentic (less well-structured) compare-contrast text. These findings support and extend previous findings that explicit instruction in comprehension is effective as early as the primary-grade level. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of question-generation training on reading comprehension.

Explored the effects of training in question generation on comprehension question performance, quality and form of generated questions, and accuracy of predicted comprehension. 260 6th-grade students were placed in 1 of 5 experimental groups: question training, question-generation practice, inference question-response practice, literal question-response practice, and no-question control. Groups met for 5 40-min lessons over a 2-wk period and were subsequently assessed during 2 testing sessions. Results indicate that Ss trained to generate questions for expository passages outperformed the comparison groups on several comprehension and metacomprehension measures. No interactions between reading skill and treatment condition were observed. Implications are drawn for the continued need for carefully developed tests of reliable strategy-training paradigms and for the implementation of question-generation activities with elementary school students. (25 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Context can constrain lexical access: Implications for models of language comprehension.

In Exp I, with 20 undergraduates, whether context can constrain lexical access was tested, using an interference version of D. A. Swinney's (see record 1981-04783-001) cross-modal lexical decision paradigm (materials appended). Data indicate that, regardless of relative frequency of use, only the contextually appropriate meanings of the ambiguous primes were activated. In order to assess the degree of equivalence directly in Exp IIa, 24 undergraduates were asked to make lexical decisions on the targets in Exp I but without any auditory context. Results suggest that the effects of context on high-frequency items do not seem to be an artifact of preexisting differences between targets and controls. In Exp IIb, with 24 undergraduates, the possibility of latent differences was examined by presenting the control lexical decision task in a dual task context. Findings demonstrate that differences among visual lexical decision targets and their controls cannot account for the results of Exp I. In general, it is suggested that context can constrain initial meaning activation, limiting lexical access to a single, contextually appropriate sense. Findings support the notion that language comprehension involves interactions among levels of speech and discourse analysis, at least at the level of word recognition. Specifically, lexical information is supplemented by and integrated with sentence-level contextual information to guide and constrain initial stages of word recognition. (47 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The intriguing role of spanish language vocabulary knowledge in predicting English reading comprehension.

This study explored a holistic model of English reading comprehension among a sample of 135 Spanish-English bilingual Latina and Latino 4th-grade students This model took into account Spanish language reading skills and language of initial literacy instruction. Controlling for language of instruction, English decoding skill, and English oral language proficiency, the authors explored the effects of Spanish language alphabetic knowledge, fluency, vocabulary knowledge, and listening comprehension on English reading comprehension. Results revealed a significant main effect for Spanish vocabulary knowledge and an interaction between Spanish vocabulary and English fluency, such that faster English readers benefited more from Spanish vocabulary knowledge than their less fluent counterparts. This study demonstrates the existence of literary skills transfer from the 1st to the 2nd language, as well as limits on such transfer. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What's meaning got to do with it: The role of vocabulary in word reading and reading comprehension.

There is at present no clear consensus as to the nature of the relations between oral vocabulary and specific literacy skills. The present study distinguished between vocabulary breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge to better explain the role of oral vocabulary in various reading skills. A sample of 60 typically developing Grade 4 students was assessed on measures of receptive and expressive vocabulary breadth, depth of vocabulary knowledge, decoding, visual word recognition, and reading comprehension. Concurrent analyses revealed that each distinct reading skill was related to the vocabulary measures in a unique manner. Receptive vocabulary breadth was the only oral vocabulary variable that predicted decoding performance after controlling for age and nonverbal intelligence. In contrast, expressive vocabulary breadth predicted visual word recognition, whereas depth of vocabulary knowledge predicted reading comprehension. The results are discussed in terms of interrelations between phonological and semantic factors in the acquisition of distinct reading skills. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of global and local context on lexical processing during language comprehension.

Nine experiments involving young adults (N?=?525) tested the roles of local (sentence) and global (discourse) contexts on lexical processing. Contextual material was presented auditorily, and naming times for the last (visually presented) word were collected. Experiment 1 tested the local contexts alone and found facilitation of naming latencies when local contexts were related to the target word. Subsequent experiments, using varying baseline conditions, found that globally related material affected naming latency in all cases, whereas the same locally related material that was used in the first study now had no facilitation effect. The globally related material had an immediate effect on naming times. The authors argue that the results are inconsistent with associatively based models and with various hybrid models of context effects and that a discourse-based model best accounts for the data. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Bilingual lexical access in context: Evidence from eye movements during reading.

Current models of bilingualism (e.g., BIA+) posit that lexical access during reading is not language selective. However, much of this research is based on the comprehension of words in isolation. The authors investigated whether nonselective access occurs for words embedded in biased sentence contexts (e.g., A. I. Schwartz & J. F. Kroll, 2006). Eye movements were recorded as French–English bilinguals read English sentences containing cognates (e.g., piano), interlingual homographs (e.g., coin, meaning corner in French), or matched control words. Sentences provided a low or high semantic constraint for target-language meanings. Both early-stage comprehension measures (e.g., first fixation duration, gaze duration, and skipping) and late-stage comprehension measures (e.g., go-past time and total reading time) showed significant cognate facilitation and interlingual homograph interference for low-constraint sentences. For high-constraint sentences, however, only early-stage comprehension measures were consistent with nonselective access. There was no evidence of cognate facilitation or interlingual homograph interference for late-stage comprehension measures. Thus, nonselective bilingual lexical access at early stages of comprehension is rapidly resolved in semantically biased contexts at later stages of comprehension. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of integrated instruction on motivation and strategy use in reading.

Effects of instructional context on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation have been examined with a variety of studies. This quasi experiment compared students receiving an instructional intervention designed to increase intrinsic motivation with students receiving traditional instruction. Concept-oriented reading instruction (CORI) integrated reading and language arts with science inquiry. It emphasized learning goals, real-world interaction (hands-on science activities), competence support (strategy instruction), autonomy support (self-directed learning), and collaboration. Traditional classrooms had the same content objectives and comparable teachers but different pedagogy. Children in CORI classrooms scored higher on motivation than did children in traditional classrooms, with effect sizes of 1.94 for curiosity and 1.71 for strategy use. Grade-level differences were found for recognition and competition. The results show that classroom contexts can be constructed to influence motivational outcomes positively. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of polysemy in lexical decision and naming: An alternative to lexical access accounts.

The effects of polysemy (number of meanings) and word frequency were examined in lexical decision and naming tasks. Polysemy effects were observed in both tasks. In the lexical decision task, high- and low-frequency words produced identical polysemy effects. In the naming task, however, polysemy interacted with frequency, with polysemy effects being limited to low-frequency words. When degraded stimuli were used in both tasks, the interaction appeared not only in naming but also in lexical decision. Because stimulus degradation also produced an effect of spelling-sound regularity in the lexical decision task, the different relationships between polysemy and frequency appear to be due to whether responding was based primarily on orthographic or phonological codes. As such, the effects of polysemy seem to be due to the nature of task-specific processes. An explanation in terms of M. S. Seidenberg and J. L. McClelland's (see record 1990-03520-001) and D. C. Plaut and J. L. McClelland's (1993) parallel distributed processing models is proposed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of attributional retraining on strategy-based reading comprehension in learning-disabled students.

Learning-disabled students received instructions about both summarization strategies and their personal beliefs about causality that were designed to improve reading comprehension. 75 upper elementary school students were assigned to 4 treatment groups. The main experimental condition received attributional retraining on paired-associate and sort-recall tasks (which were unrelated to the target comprehension tests), instructions on the use of a summarization strategy, attributional statements about the efficacy of the instructed strategy, and posttests by which we assessed reading skills and general attributional beliefs. Students in another experimental condition received an identical treatment package without prior attributional retraining on unrelated paired-associate and sort-recall tasks but with attributional statements embedded in the summarization strategy. Ss in one control condition received strategy training (without attributional retraining), whereas those in the other received neither strategy nor attribution instructions. Results suggested that attributional training enhanced the maintenance of the summarization strategy and selectivity facilitated generalization. Domain-specific attributional beliefs seemed to provide important orientating and perseverating characteristics that enhanced goal-directed, strategic processing in learning-impaired students. In spite of performance improvements, however, long-standing, antecedent attributional beliefs were unaltered by program-specific attributional training. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of iconicity and semantic relatedness on lexical access in american sign language.

Iconicity is a property that pervades the lexicon of many sign languages, including American Sign Language (ASL). Iconic signs exhibit a motivated, nonarbitrary mapping between the form of the sign and its meaning. We investigated whether iconicity enhances semantic priming effects for ASL and whether iconic signs are recognized more quickly than noniconic signs are (controlling for strength of iconicity, semantic relatedness, familiarity, and imageability). Twenty deaf signers made lexical decisions to the 2nd item of a prime–target pair. Iconic target signs were preceded by prime signs that were (a) iconic and semantically related, (b) noniconic and semantically related, or (c) semantically unrelated. In addition, a set of noniconic target signs was preceded by semantically unrelated primes. Significant facilitation was observed for target signs when they were preceded by semantically related primes. However, iconicity did not increase the priming effect (e.g., the target sign PIANO was primed equally by the iconic sign GUITAR and the noniconic sign MUSIC). In addition, iconic signs were not recognized faster or more accurately than were noniconic signs. These results confirm the existence of semantic priming for sign language and suggest that iconicity does not play a robust role in online lexical processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Frequency drives lexical access in reading but not in speaking: The frequency-lag hypothesis.

To contrast mechanisms of lexical access in production versus comprehension we compared the effects of word frequency (high, low), context (none, low constraint, high constraint), and level of English proficiency (monolingual, Spanish–English bilingual, Dutch–English bilingual) on picture naming, lexical decision, and eye fixation times. Semantic constraint effects were larger in production than in reading. Frequency effects were larger in production than in reading without constraining context but larger in reading than in production with constraining context. Bilingual disadvantages were modulated by frequency in production but not in eye fixation times, were not smaller in low-constraint contexts, and were reduced by high-constraint contexts only in production and only at the lowest level of English proficiency. These results challenge existing accounts of bilingual disadvantages and reveal fundamentally different processes during lexical access across modalities, entailing a primarily semantically driven search in production but a frequency-driven search in comprehension. The apparently more interactive process in production than comprehension could simply reflect a greater number of frequency-sensitive processing stages in production. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The influence of reading purpose on inference generation and comprehension in reading.

There are variations in the extent to which particular types of inferences or activations are made during reading (G. McKoon & R. Ratcliff, 1992; M. Singer, 1994). In this study, the authors investigated the influence of reading purpose (for entertainment or study) on inference generation. Participants read 2 texts aloud and 2 texts for comprehension measures. Reading purpose did not influence off-line behavior (comprehension) but did influence on-line reader behavior (thinking aloud). Readers with a study purpose more often repeated the text, acknowledged a lack of background knowledge, and evaluated the text content and writing than did readers with an entertainment purpose. This pattern was stronger for the expository text than for the narrative text. Reading purpose, and possibly text type, affects the kinds of inferences that readers generate. Hence, inferential activities are at least partially under the reader's strategic control. (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)     

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)     

Strategy use on standardized reading comprehension tests.

Strategy use and its impact on standardized reading test performance were investigated. High school students were randomly assigned to 2 groups, standardized test and main idea, with separate control and think-aloud conditions. In the standardized think-aloud group, students thought aloud while taking a portion of a reading test, consisting of passages accompanied by several questions each. In the main idea conditions, students read the same passages with the lower level questions removed and answered a single multiple-choice question about the main idea of each passage, having been told that the task was not a test. Both groups used strategies, and students in the standardized test condition made significantly greater use of strategies than students in the main idea condition. Significant between-group differences were found in use of rereading. In comparisons between the think-aloud and control conditions, thinking aloud was found to have a significant detrimental effect on students' ability to identify passage main ideas. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Rapid change in lexical development in comprehension and production.

24 infants were given word comprehension tests at 2-mo intervals from 14 to 22 mo. For each word, the child observed 2 slides and was prompted to look at 1 named by the experimenter. Visual fixation following the prompt was compared with fixation during a preprompt baseline to calculate a word comprehension score reflecting increase of attention to the referent independent of initial salience. The month-to-month change in comprehension scores revealed a spurt or surge for some but not all children, with the largest number of spurts occurring in the 20–22 mo interval. For a subset of children (n?=?18), parents maintained diaries of spoken words. For a statistically significant number of children, the presence of a comprehension spurt was associated with the presence of a production spurt. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonological variation and inference in lexical access.

Recent experiments have indicated that lexical access in speech is highly intolerant of mismatch. An isolated sequence such as [wlk1b] strongly disrupts access to the underlying lexical entry (wicked). This observation seems inconsistent with the systematic variability found in the phonetic form of words. Two cross-modal priming experiments tested the hypothesis that phonologically regular variation is perceptually acceptable. Participants heard tokens like [wlk1b] embedded in contexts that either licensed the change as a result of a regular assimilation process (e.g., [wlk1b pr?nk]) or rendered the change phonologically unviable (e.g., [wlk1b gelm]). The tokens with contextually unviable deviations did not effectively access lexical representations. In contrast, the same tokens in viable phonological context primed as strongly as unchanged controls. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)