Expository Text Comprehension in the Primary Grade Classroom.

This study investigates the effectiveness of an instructional program designed to teach 2nd graders how to comprehend compare-contrast expository text. Along with introducing new content (animal classification), the program emphasizes text structure via clue words, a sequence of questions, and a graphic organizer, and via the close analysis of specially constructed exemplar paragraphs. The authors compared the program with (a) more traditional instruction that focused only on the new content and (b) a no instruction control; 128 7- and 8-year-olds participated. Classroom teachers provided the instruction. The program improved students' ability to comprehend compare-contrast texts. Students were able to demonstrate transfer to uninstructed compare-contrast texts though not to text structures other than compare-contrast. Moreover, the text structure instruction did not detract from their ability to learn new content. The results provide evidence, heretofore lacking, that explicit instruction in comprehension is feasible and effective as early as the 2nd grade. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Comparison of Flesch readability scores with a test of reading comprehension.

101 high school seniors, who had taken the Diagnostic Reading Test, read ten 100-word passages judged to be of equal interest but varied systematically in Reading Ease score from 5 to 95 at 10-point intervals and took brief objective-type Comprehension Tests on them. "In general, differences between mean comprehension scores for adjacent RE levels were significant at the 5% level. From these findings it is inferred the Flesch RE scores do adequately estimate the comparative difficulty in comprehension of 'popular' reading material for a 17- to 18-year-old group." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Still more about the comprehension of "less."

32 3-4 yr old children were asked to indicate "Which one has less?" in 4 different contexts. Results indicate that performance was the same in all contexts indicating that "more" is acquired before "less" and that those children who do not know "less" treat it as a synonym of "more." Differing results of previous studies cannot be attributed to the type of materials to which the comparative judgments are applied. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonological typicality influences sentence processing in predictive contexts: Reply to Staub, Grant, Clifton, and Rayner (2009).

In 2 separate self-paced reading experiments, Farmer, Christiansen, and Monaghan (2006) found that the degree to which a word's phonology is typical of other words in its lexical category influences online processing of nouns and verbs in predictive contexts. Staub, Grant, Clifton, and Rayner (2009) failed to find an effect of phonological typicality when they combined stimuli from the separate experiments into a single experiment. We replicated Staub et al.'s experiment and found that the combination of stimulus sets affects the predictiveness of the syntactic context; this reduces the phonological typicality effect as the experiment proceeds, although the phonological typicality effect was still evident early in the experiment. Although an ambiguous context may diminish sensitivity to the probabilistic relationship between the sound of a word and its lexical category, phonological typicality does influence online sentence processing during normal reading when the syntactic context is predictive of the lexical category of upcoming words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Still no phonological typicality effect on word reading time (and no good explanation of one, either): A rejoinder to Farmer, Monaghan, Misyak, and Christiansen.

In this brief rejoinder, we respond to Farmer, Monaghan, Misyak, and Christiansen (2011). We argue that the data still do not support the claim that reading time is affected by the phonological typicality of a word for its part of speech. We also question Farmer et al.'s claim that interleaving syntactic structures in an experiment modifies grammatically based syntactic expectations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Impaired verbal comprehension of quantifiers in corticobasal syndrome.

Objective: Patients with Corticobasal Syndrome (CBS) have atrophy in posterior parietal cortex. This region of atrophy has been previously linked with quantifier comprehension difficulty, but previous studies employed visual stimuli, making it difficult to account for potentially confounding visuospatial deficits in CBS patients. The current study evaluated comprehension of generalized quantifiers using strictly verbal materials. Method: Non-aphasic CBS patients, a brain-damaged control group (consisting of patients with Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal dementia), and age-matched healthy controls participated in this study. We assessed familiar temporal, spatial, and monetary domains of verbal knowledge comparatively. Judgment accuracy was only evaluated in statements for which patients demonstrated accurate factual knowledge about the target domain. Results: We found that patients with CBS are significantly impaired in their ability to evaluate quantifiers when compared to healthy seniors and a brain-damaged control group, even in this strictly verbal task. This impairment was seen in the vast majority of individual CBS patients. Conclusions: These findings offer additional evidence of quantifier impairment in CBS patients and emphasize that this impairment cannot be attributed to potential visuo spatial processing impairments in patients with parietal disease. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 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)     

Teaching phonics in the context of children's literature or spelling: Influences on first-grade reading, spelling, and writing and fifth-grade comprehension.

First-grade children's reading, writing, and spelling competencies in 2 different instructional contexts for teaching phonics were examined. Reading, writing, and spelling abilities were measured at the beginning, middle, and end of 1st grade. Children were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 treatments designed to teach grapheme-phoneme correspondences, blending, and segmenting. In 1 treatment, children generated spellings for words, and in the other treatment, phonics instruction was embedded in literature. The spelling treatment was significantly better for spelling phonetically regular real and pseudowords, reading phonetically regular pseudowords, and written story length. It was also more beneficial for low-ability children's reading of connected text. There were no treatment effects on reading uncontrolled words in text. At the end of 5th grade, spelling-context children had significantly higher comprehension than did literature-context children. Discussion focuses on phonological processing while spelling and the effects of the instructional press of context-embedded and context-reduced instructional approaches in 1st grade. (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)     

Listening comprehension, oral expression, reading comprehension, and written expression: Related yet unique language systems in grades 1, 3, 5, and 7.

Age-normed tests of listening comprehension, oral expression, reading comprehension, and written expression were administered in Grades 1 (n = 128), 3, and 5, or 3 (n = 113), 5, and 7. Confirmatory factor analyses compared 1- and 4-factor models at each grade level and supported a 4-factor model of language by ear, mouth, eye, and hand. Multiple regressions identified which of the 3 other language skills explained unique variance in each of the 4 language skill outcomes and provided additional evidence that language is not a single skill. Individuals' ipsative scores (amount that the standard score for age on each language measure deviated from individual's mean for all 4 measures) showed that 25% to 30% of individuals showed relative strengths or weaknesses (±1 SD) in specific language skills, but only 7% were stable across Grades 3 and 5. Findings are discussed in reference to (a) theoretical implications for idea comprehension and expression via language by ear, mouth, eye, and hand; and (b) educational applications of observed developmental and individual differences for general, special, and gifted education. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)