Using working memory theory to investigate the construct validity of multiple-choice reading comprehension tests such as the SAT.

When taking multiple-choice tests of reading comprehension such as the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT), test takers use a range of strategies that vary in the extent to which they emphasize reading the questions versus reading the passages. Researchers have challenged the construct validity of these tests because test takers can achieve better-than-chance performance even if they do not read the passages at all. By using an individual-differences approach that compares the relative power of working memory span to predict SAT performance for different test-taking strategies, the authors show that the SAT appears to be tapping reading comprehension processes as long as test takers engage in at least some reading of the passages themselves. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Listening in aging adults: From discourse comprehension to psychoacoustics.

Older adults, with or without clinical hearing loss, have more trouble than younger people understanding speech in everyday life. These age-related difficulties in speech understanding may be attributed to changes in higher-level cognitive processes such as language comprehension, memory, attention, and cognitive slowing, or to lower-level sensory and perceptual processes. A complicating factor in determining how these sources might contribute to age-related declines in speech understanding is that they are highly correlated. This study describes attempts to systematically investigate sensory-cognitive interactions in controlled experimental situations. The authors looked at experimental conditions that closely approximate everyday listening, and show that older adults do indeed experience deficits in spoken language comprehension relative to younger adults in these conditions. Finally, further experiments designed to isolate more precisely the cognitive and perceptual sources of these age-related differences and how they vary with listening condition are reviewed. In large part, it was found that age-related changes in speech understanding are a consequence of auditory declines. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Time course of phonological activation during reading: Evidence from eye fixations.

Eye fixation data suggest that readers use orthographic codes rather than phonological codes to activate word meanings. Whereas proofreading data show that readers are less likely to detect homophonic errors (e.g., He was in his silk stocking feat) than nonhomophonic errors (e.g., He was in his silk stocking fate), the eye fixations revealed that readers initially experienced as much difficulty encountering a homophonic error as a nonhomophonic one. However, homophony facilitated the recovery process, thus suggesting that phonology has its influence after lexical access. Exp 1 showed that the findings were consistent whether the error was the lower frequency homophone (stocking feat) or the higher frequency homophone (feet of courage). Exp 2 showed that proofreading responses are unreliable indices of error detection because even when readers fail to make an overt error detection response, their eye fixations reveal that they have detected the error. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What's in a name? Many fascinating things.

Reviews the book, Names for Things: A Study of Human Learning by John Macnamara (1982). The reviewer commends Macnamara for writing a convincing book that undermines most of the popular psychological and philosophical approaches to meaning, reference, language learning and cognitive development. The major subject matter of this book is how children learn the names for things. Macnamara dismisses the view that children are unable to arrange related ideas into adult-like hierarchical orders, as Piaget claims. The reviewer feels the weakest part of the book is the author's chapter on the definition of "meaning", but does admit to having a much richer concept of what meaning is not. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

How aging affects the reading of words in noisy backgrounds.

Young and old adults were shown simple sentences masked by visual noise. In half of the sentences, the final word was predictable; in the other half, it was not. The older participants were able to identify the same number of final words as the younger ones only when the intensity of the visual noise was significantly diminished. However, the difference in the number of correct identifications between predictable and unpredictable conditions was higher for the older observers than for the younger observers, indicating that older observers benefit from context more. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Does the Information Content of an Irrelevant Source Differentially Affect Spoken Word Recognition in Younger and Older Adults?

To determine whether older adults find it difficult to inhibit the processing of irrelevant speech, the authors asked younger and older adults to listen to and repeat meaningless sentences (e.g., "A rose could paint a fish") when the perceived location of the masker (speech or noise) but not the target was manipulated. Separating the perceived location (but not the physical location) of the masker from the target speech produced a much larger improvement in performance when the masker was informational (2 people talking) than when the masker was noise. However, the size of this effect was the same for younger and older adults, suggesting that cognitive-level interference from an irrelevant source was no worse for older adults than it was for younger adults. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Why do older adults have difficulty following conversations?

Age-related declines in understanding conversation may be largely a consequence of perceptual rather than cognitive declines. B. A. Schneider, M. Daneman, D. R. Murphy, and S. Kwong-See (2000) showed that age-related declines in comprehending single-talker discourse could be eliminated when adjustments were made to compensate for the poorer hearing of older adults. The authors used B. A. Schneider et al.'s methodology to investigate age-related differences in comprehending 2-person conversations. Compensating for hearing difficulties did not eliminate age-related differences when the 2 talkers were spatially separated by 9° or 45° azimuth, but it did when the talkers' contributions came from one central location. These findings suggest that dialogue poses more of a problem for older than for younger adults, not because of the additional cognitive requirements of having to follow 2 talkers rather than 1, but because older adults are not as good as younger adults at making use of the auditory cues that are available for helping listeners perceptually segregate the contributions of 2 spatially separated talkers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Listening to discourse in distracting settings: The effects of aging.

Younger and older adults listened to discourse in quiet and in conversational noise, before answering questions concerning the material. Some questions required listeners to recall specific details; others were of a more integrative nature. When the listening situation was adjusted for individual differences in hearing, younger and older adults were equally adept at remembering the gist of the passages in both quiet and in two levels of noise. The two age groups also did not differ with respect to memory for specific details when listening in quiet or in a moderate level of noise, even when required to perform a concurrent task. Only at the loudest noise level did younger adults tend to recall more detail than older adults. However, when no adjustments were made to compensate for the poorer hearing of older adults (all participants tested under identical listening conditions), older adults could not recall as much detail as younger adults, either in quiet or in noise. The results indicate that the speech-comprehension difficulties of older adults primarily reflect declines in hearing rather than in cognitive ability. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

How to assess the listening comprehension skills of prereaders.

In Exp I, a listening span test, a word span test, and a listening comprehension test were administered to 24 preschoolers (ages 3 yrs 2 mo to 5 yrs 2 mo) to determine whether listening span correlated well with Ss' listening integration skills. In Exp II, with 20 preschoolers (aged 3 yrs 4 mo to 5 yrs) a longer listening comprehension test was administered in which comprehension depended on the integration of at least 2 important ideas in the narrative. Results show that the measure of listening span was a successful measure of the listening comprehension skills of prereaders because it tapped skills at an intermediate level of complexity. The word span measure involved lower-level processes like word encoding and lexical access, but listening span captured many of the processes of normal sentence comprehension. In addition, listening span was easy to administer and had high predictive validity. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Syntactic form, semantic complexity, and short-term memory: Influences on children's acquisition of new linguistic structures.

30 children at 5 age levels (2–6 yrs) were exposed to novel actions involving 1, 2, or 3 semantic features. Simultaneously, they were taught novel labels for these actions. The labels marked the semantic features syntactically, with either a suffix, a prefix, or both a suffix and a prefix. In posttests Ss had to either supply the appropriate label for an action or produce an appropriate action for a label. Results show that (a) semantic complexity affected the difficulty of producing actions but not labels, (b) syntactic complexity affected the difficulty of producing labels but not actions, (c) there was an age below which little learning was evident on either test, (d) short-term memory (STM) was a better predictor of performance than was age, and (e) the STM value associated with each item corresponded approximately to the number of features, syntactic or semantic, that had to be processed to produce the form in question. (14 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)