Search

Letter position coding has been extensively examined in studies of isolated word identification, spurring the development of computational models. However, these models are largely restricted to explaining word identification in foveal vision, despite the fact that early lexical processing during reading occurs in the parafovea. We report four experiments that examined the flexibility of parafoveal letter identity and position coding using a variant of the same–different match task. Participants matched transposed- and substituted-letter strings to reference words, with the former being displayed at various retinal eccentricities for 100 ms versus 300 ms to respectively preclude or allow eye movements. The first pair of experiments demonstrated the relative difficulty of coding parafoveal letter positions as compared to their identities, as well as the standard benefit in identifying words displayed in the right visual field. The second pair of experiments further demonstrated that the location of letter-position uncertainty (i.e., transposed letters) interacts with both eccentricity and visual field. Initial letter transpositions were more easily detected in the left visual field, whereas transpositions of the final letters were more accurately detected in the right visual field. As discussed, these results are challenging for existing models of reading, which can individually account for some of our findings but not the results in their entirety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online testing for behavioral research has become an increasingly used tool. Although more researchers have been using online data collection methods, few studies have assessed the replicability of findings for speech intelligibility tasks. Here we assess intelligibility in quiet and two noise-added conditions for several different accents of English (Midland American, Standard Southern British, Scottish, German-accented, Mandarin-accented, Japanese-accented, and Hindi-English bilingual). Participants were tested in person at a museum-based laboratory and online. Results showed little to no difference between the two settings for the easier noise condition and in quiet, but large performance differences in the most difficult noise condition with an advantage for the participants tested online. Technology-based variables did not appear to drive the setting effect, but experimenter presence may have influenced response strategy for the in-person group and differences in demographics could have provided advantages for the online group. Additional research should continue to investigate how setting, demographic factors, experimenter presence, and motivational factors interact to determine performance in speech perception experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstractionist models of visual word recognition can easily accommodate the absence of visual similarity effects in misspelled common words (e.g., viotin vs. viocin) during lexical decision tasks. However, these models fail to account for the sizable effects of visual similarity observed in misspelled brand names (e.g., anazon produces longer responses and more errors than atazon). Importantly, this dissociation has only been reported in separate experiments. Thus, a crucial experiment is necessary to simultaneously examine the role of visual similarity with misspelled common words and brand names. In the current experiment, participants performed a lexical decision task using both brand names and common words. Nonword foils were created by replacing visually similar letters (e.g., anazon [baseword: amazon], anarilllo [amarillo, yellow]) or visually dissimilar letters (e.g., atazon, atarillo). Results showed sizeable visual letter similarity effects for misspelled brand names in response times and percent error. Critically, these effects were absent for misspelled common words. The pervasiveness of visual similarity effects for misspelled brand names, even in the presence of common words, challenges purely abstractionist accounts of visual word recognition. Instead, these findings support instance-based and weakly abstractionist theories, suggesting that episodic traces in the mental lexicon may retain perceptual information, particularly when words are repeatedly presented in a similar format.

The efficacy of audiovisual (AV) integration is reflected in the degree of cross-modal suppression of the auditory event-related potentials (ERPs, P1-N1-P2), while stronger semantic encoding is reflected in enhanced late ERP negativities (e.g., N450). We hypothesized that increasing visual stimulus reliability should lead to more robust AV-integration and enhanced semantic prediction, reflected in suppression of auditory ERPs and enhanced N450, respectively. EEG was acquired while individuals watched and listened to clear and blurred videos of a speaker uttering intact or highly-intelligible degraded (vocoded) words and made binary judgments about word meaning (animate or inanimate). We found that intact speech evoked larger negativity between 280-527-ms than vocoded speech, suggestive of more robust semantic prediction for the intact signal. For visual reliability, we found that greater cross-modal ERP suppression occurred for clear than blurred videos prior to sound onset and for the P2 ERP. Additionally, the later semantic-related negativity tended to be larger for clear than blurred videos. These results suggest that the cross-modal effect is largely confined to suppression of early auditory networks with weak effect on networks associated with semantic prediction. However, the semantic-related visual effect on the late negativity may have been tempered by the vocoded signal's high-reliability.

The debate about how attention is allocated during readinghas been framed in as: Either attention is allocated in a strictlyserial manner, to support the identification of one word at atime, or it is allocated as a gradient, to support the concurrentprocessing of multiple words. The first part of this article re-views reading models to examine the feasibility of both posi-tions. Although word-identification and sentence-processingmodels assume that words are identified serially to incremen-tally build larger units of representation, discourse-processingmodel allow several propositions to be co-active in workingmemory. The remainder of this article then describes an in-stance-based model of word identification, Über-Reader, andsimulations comparing the identification of single words andword pairs. These simulations indicate that, although wordpairs can be identified, accurate identification is restricted toshort high-frequency words due to the computational de-mands of both memory retrieval and limited visual acuity.

This article reports six experiments in which participants made speeded binary decisions about letter strings that were displayed for 100 versus 300 ms at different retinal eccentricities in the left versus right visual field to examine how these variables and task demands influence word-identification accuracy and latency. Across the experiments, lexical-processing performance decreased with eccentricity, but to a lesser degree for words displayed in the right visual field, replicating previous reports. However, the effect of eccentricity was attenuated for the two tasks that required "deep" semantic judgments (e.g., discriminating words that referenced animals vs. objects) relative to the tasks that required "shallow" letter and/or lexical processing (e.g., detecting words containing a pre-specified target letter, discriminating words from nonwords). These results suggest that lexical and supra-lexical knowledge play a significant role in supporting lexical processing, especially at greater eccentricities, thereby allowing readers to extend the visual span, or region of effective letter processing, into the perceptual span, or region of useful information extraction. The broader theoretical implications of these findings are discussed in relation to existing and future models of reading. Public Significance Statement: This study examines how visual factors, such as visual acuity and visual crowding, affect the identification of letters and words. We provide evidence that the impact of these low-level factors depends on task demands, for example, deciding whether a letter string is a word or nonword, or deciding whether a word is an animal or object. The findings are relevant for developing and discriminating between computational models of skilled reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Word identification is slower and less accurate outside central vision, but the precise relationship between retinal eccentricity and lexical processing is not well specified by models of either word identification or reading. In a seminal eye-movement study, Rayner and Morrison (1981) found that participants made remarkably accurate naming and lexical-decision responses to words displayed more than 3 degrees from the center of vision--even under conditions requiring fixed gaze. However, the validity of these findings is challenged by a range of methodological limitations. We report a series of gaze-contingent lexical-decision and naming experiments that replicate and extend Rayner and Morrison's study to provide a more accurate estimate of how visual constraints delimit lexical processing. Simulations were conducted using the E-Z Reader model (Reichle et al., 2012) to assess the implications for understanding eye-movement control during reading. Augmenting the model's assumptions about the impact of both eccentricity and visual crowding on the rate of lexical processing provided good fits to the observed data without impairing the model's ability to simulate benchmark eye-movement effects. The findings are discussed with a view toward the development of a complete model of reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During reading, readers intentionally do not fixate a wordwhen highly confident in its identity. In a rational model ofreading, word skipping decisions should be complex functionsof the particular word, linguistic context, and visual informa-tion available. In contrast, simple heuristic of reading onlypredicts additive effects of word and context features. Here wetest these predictions by implementing a rational model withBayesian inference, and predicting human skipping with theentropy of this model’s posterior distribution. Results showeda significant effect of the entropy in predicting skipping abovea strong baseline model including word and context features.This pattern held for entropy measures from rational modelswith a frequency prior but not from ones with a 5-gram prior.These results suggest complex interactions between visual in-put and linguistic knowledge as predicted by the rational modelof reading, and a dominant role of frequency in making skip-ping decisions.

Background and Objectives: The study attempted to trace age-related changes in speech perception in typically developing children (=3 to =6 years) using the "Early Speech Perception (ESP)" in Tamil. The test was developed in line with the original English version of ESP but adapted to suit the linguistic requirement of the Tamil language. Subjects and Methods: Using a cross-sectional design, the test was administered to 205 children with normal hearing who were classified into three age groups (=3 to =4, >4 to =5, and >5 to =6 years). The developed test had three subtests (syllable categorization, bisyllable word identification, and trisyllable word identification). Results: All three age groups obtained perfect or near-perfect scores on the three subtests of ESP. There was no significant difference observed between the two adjacent age groups (=3 to =4 vs. >4 to =5 years, >4 to =5 vs. >5 to =6 years) for all three subtests. However, significant differences were seen only between the youngest and the oldest age groups for the three subtests (=3 to =4 vs. >5 to =6 years). Conclusions: The results indicated that ESP in Tamil can be performed effectively in all the three age groups studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The standard model is that word identification in reading isa holistic process, most efficient when words are centered inthe visual field. In contrast, rational models of reading predictword identification to be a constructive process, where readersefficiently gather visual information about a word, and maycombine visual information about different parts of the wordobtained across multiple fixations to identify it. We tease apartthese accounts by arguing that rational models should predictthat the most efficient place in a word to make a second fixa-tion (refixation) depends on the visual information the readerhas already obtained. We present evidence supporting this pre-diction from an eye movement corpus. Computational modelsimulations confirm that a rational model predicts this find-ing, but a model implementing holistic identification does not.These results suggest that refixations can be well understoodas rationally gathering visual information, and that word iden-tification works constructively.

Aim: It is a long-lasting dispute whether serif or sans serif fonts are more legible. However, different fonts vary on numerous visual parameters, not just serifs. We investigated whether a difference in word identification can be attributed to the presence or absence of serifs or to the contrast of the letter stroke. Method: Participants performed a word-recognition two-interval, forced-choice task (Exp. 1) and a classic lexical decision task (Exp. 2). In both experiments the word stimuli were set with four new fonts, which were developed to isolate the stylistic features of serif and letter-stroke contrast. Two measures (i.e., font-size threshold & sensitivity) were analysed. Results: The threshold measure of both experiments yielded a single significant main effect of stroke contrast such that low stroke contrast elicited lower than high stroke contrast. The sensitivity measure of Experiment 1 yielded a single significant effect of the interaction between serifs and stroke contrast. Specifically, at the sans-serif level, low stroke contrast revealed better sensitivity, relative to high stroke contrast. At the serif level, the opposite stroke contrast pattern was observed. Conclusion: Sans serif fonts with low stroke contrast yield better performance and if a serif font is used, high stroke contrast yields better performance than low stroke contrast. Limitations and future directions are discussed.

• Word length and frequency influence lexical processes in word identification. • Grade level influences the effects of word frequency and word length. • Children's language skills modify word frequency and length effects. • Language skills influence lexical processes, especially for learning readers. The purpose of the current study was to examine the combined effect of word length and lexical frequency in a lexical decision task in second- and fifth-grade children with varying language skills. The participants, 47 second graders and 55 fifth graders, performed a lexical decision task in which word length and lexical frequency were manipulated orthogonally so that 32 words were short and frequent (e.g., fleur [ flower ]), 32 words were short and rare (e.g., navet [ turnip ]), 32 words were long and frequent (e.g., escalier [ staircase ]), and 32 words were long and rare (e.g., boussole [ compass ]). Language skills (phonological awareness, reading, vocabulary, and rapid automatized naming skills) were measured using standard language tests. The results showed that word length and, to a lesser extent, lexical frequency influence the speed and accuracy of word identification in different ways, depending on the children's educational level. Furthermore, language skills were found to influence the effects of word length and frequency, differently in second- and fifth-grade children. The results are interpreted within the dual-route model of visual word recognition. The role of language skills in the implementation of these processes is also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the relationship of lexical representations, pronunciation variation, and word recognition, by investigating effects of two lexical variables: Phonological Neighborhood Density (the number of words that can be formed by a single phoneme substitution, addition, or deletion from the target word), as well as a measure of the perceptual similarity of a target word to other words in the lexicon. We show that perceptual similarity to other words affects recognition, but not production. Phonological Neighborhood Density, on the other hand, affects both word durations and recognition accuracy (words with many neighbors shorten and are difficult recognition targets). We interpret our results as indicating that effects of Phonological Neighborhood Density on pronunciation are not generally due to perceptual similarity of the target to other words. Our results are consistent with a more general line of research demonstrating effects of 'central' processes on 'peripheral' processes such as articulation, as well as effects of modality-specific properties, such as auditory similarity and motor movements, on measures thought to tap central processes.

We examine the relationship of lexical representations, pronunciation variation, and word recognition, by investigating effects of two lexical variables: Phonological Neighborhood Density (the number of words that can be formed by a single phoneme substitution, addition, or deletion from the target word), as well as a measure of the perceptual similarity of a target word to other words in the lexicon. We show that perceptual similarity to other words affects recognition, but not production. Phonological Neighborhood Density, on the other hand, affects both word durations and recognition accuracy (words with many neighbors shorten and are difficult recognition targets). We interpret our results as indicating that effects of Phonological Neighborhood Density on pronunciation are not generally due to perceptual similarity of the target to other words. Our results are consistent with a more general line of research demonstrating effects of 'central' processes on 'peripheral' processes such as articulation, as well as effects of modality-specific properties, such as auditory similarity and motor movements, on measures thought to tap central processes.

The current study investigated the extraction of orthographic and phonological structure of written words in adults with dyslexia. In adults without learning difficulties, Chetail and Content showed that orthographic structure, as determined by the number of vowel letter clusters, influences visual word length estimation. The authors also found a phonological effect determined by the number of syllables of words. In the present study, 22 French-speaking students diagnosed with dyslexia in childhood and 22 students without learning disabilities were compared. All participants performed the task of estimating word length. The pattern of results obtained by Chetail and Content was replicated: length estimates were biased by both the number of syllables and the number of vowel letter clusters. The study showed a significant interaction between phonological bias and group. The phonological effect was less important in students with dyslexia, suggesting reduced sensitivity to phonological parsing in reading. In contrast, the orthographic effect did not differ significantly between groups, suggesting that the sensitivity to the orthographic structure of written words is preserved in students with dyslexia despite their low-quality orthographic representations. We conclude that there is no systematic association between sensitivity to the structure of representations and quality of their content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unfortunately, far too many American adolescents are unable to read proficiently. The science of reading suggests explicit instruction in both word identification and language processing skills should bolster reading proficiency, but most commercial reading interventions for secondary students focus exclusively on the latter skill area. This study explored the effectiveness of the Lexia PowerUp Literacy program (PowerUp), a digital reading intervention that provides explicit instruction in word identification, grammar, and comprehension. There were 122 sixth-grade students attending low-SES schools who participated in this year-long study. Students who used PowerUp showed significantly greater gains on an assessment of word identification, syntactic processing, and basic reading comprehension skills compared to students using an alternative program that offered opportunities to apply comprehension strategies in the absence of explicit and skills-based instruction. Results demonstrate the value of instruction extending beyond comprehension strategies to incorporate the full complement of skills needed for reading proficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyses of word prosody have shown that in some Indonesian languages listeners do not make use of word stress cues. The outcomes have contributed to the conclusion that these languages do not have word stress. The current study revisits this conclusion and investigates to what extent speakers of Papuan Malay, a language of Eastern Indonesia, use suprasegmental stress cues to recognize words. Acoustically, this language exhibits predictable word level prominence patterns, which could facilitate word recognition. However, the literature lacks a crucial perceptual verification, and related languages in the Trade Malay family have been analyzed as stressless. This could be indicative of either regional variation or different criteria to diagnose word stress. To investigate this issue, the current study reviews the literature on which criteria were decisive to diagnose (the absence of) word stress in Indonesian and Trade Malay. An acoustic analysis and a gating task investigate the usefulness of Papuan Malay stress cues for word recognition. Results show that Papuan Malay listeners are indeed able to use suprasegmental stress cues to identify words. The outcomes are discussed in a typological perspective to shed light on how production and perception studies contribute to stress diagnosis cross-linguistically.

We present an algorithm for the automatic processing of cloze test results that are traditionally analyzed and adjusted by hand. The algorithm accurately includes inflected and derived forms of the target word as correct responses, as well as minor spelling mistakes and typographical errors. We provide a test of the algorithm against the coding of one expert human observer and find that the algorithm performs with equal accuracy. We further examine the utility of the algorithm for the analysis of data involving word identification with typed responses. The routines are implemented in R-software and are freely available.

Abstractionist models of visual word recognition can easily accommodate the absence of visual similarity effects in misspelled common words (e.g., viotin vs. viocin ) during lexical decision tasks. However, these models fail to account for the sizable effects of visual similarity observed in misspelled brand names (e.g., anazon produces longer responses and more errors than atazon ). Importantly, this dissociation has only been reported in separate experiments. Thus, a crucial experiment is necessary to simultaneously examine the role of visual similarity with misspelled common words and brand names. In the current experiment, participants performed a lexical decision task using both brand names and common words. Nonword foils were created by replacing visually similar letters (e.g., anazon [baseword: amazon ], anarilllo [amarillo, yellow]) or visually dissimilar letters (e.g., atazon, atarillo ). Results showed sizeable visual letter similarity effects for misspelled brand names in response times and percent error. Critically, these effects were absent for misspelled common words. The pervasiveness of visual similarity effects for misspelled brand names, even in the presence of common words, challenges purely abstractionist accounts of visual word recognition. Instead, these findings support instance-based and weakly abstractionist theories, suggesting that episodic traces in the mental lexicon may retain perceptual information, particularly when words are repeatedly presented in a similar format., Competing Interests: The authors have no competing interests to declare., (Copyright: © 2024 The Author(s).)

This study investigates Jordanian EFL teachers' perspectives on the impact of Interactive Whiteboard (IWB) technology on word identification enhancement. Drawing on the theory of Multimedia Learning, the research aims to address a gap in the literature regarding EFL educators' perceptions of using IWBs to improve word identification skills. A cross-sectional survey was administered to 124 Jordanian EFL teachers, and data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, paired t-tests, and one-way ANOVA. The findings reveal positive attitudes among Jordanian EFL teachers towards the efficacy of IWB technology in enhancing word identification. Participants overwhelmingly support the favorable use of IWBs and recognize their potential to enhance word identification skills. Importantly, no significant differences were found across demographic variables, suggesting a consistent recognition of IWB efficacy irrespective of gender, age, academic degree, or years of experience. The results underscore the importance of integrating IWB technology into EFL classrooms and highlight the need for further exploration of pedagogical approaches to maximize its benefits. This study contributes to the literature by providing insights into the perceptions of Jordanian EFL teachers regarding IWB technology and its role in word identification enhancement. It advocates for the continued utilization and exploration of IWB technology to enhance language teaching and learning practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Readers intentionally do not fixate some words, thought to be those they have already identified. In a rational model of reading, these word skipping decisions should be complex functions of the particular word, linguistic context, and visual information available. In contrast, heuristic models of reading only predict additive effects of word and context features. Here we test these predictions by implementing a rational model with Bayesian inference and predicting human skipping with the entropy of this model's posterior distribution. Results showed a significant effect of the entropy in predicting skipping above a strong baseline model including word and context features. This pattern held for entropy measures from rational models with a frequency prior but not from models with a 5‐gram prior. These results suggest complex interactions between visual input and linguistic knowledge as predicted by the rational model of reading, and a dominant role of frequency in making skipping decisions. When we read, we do not fixate on each word! How does that work? By deep theory those sorts of decisions must be the result of complex decisions involving the specific "word," the linguistic context in which it appears, and visual information. But is reading really all that difficult? After all, simple heuristics models of reading seem to do sort of okay by only considering the additive effects of word and context. Entropy measures do well at predicting word "skipping" and suggest that "word frequency" may play the dominant role in the "decision" to skip or not skip! [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Recent international research comparing reading abilities in children reveal distinct difficulties in reading comprehension for German students. In detail, every fifth child can only retrieve and comprehend explicit information from a written text but shows difficulties in combining information, inferencing and interpreting texts. Aims: The aim of the study is to determine specific components of language-, literacy- and cognitive skills that contribute to the difficulties in reading comprehension among students with special educational needs. Based on these specifications implications for treatment will be given. Methods: Based on the data of 184 fourth-grade students from special education school centers (Sonderpädagogische Förderzentren) correlation analysis are calculated between specific components of language-, literacy- and cognitive skills and the level of reading comprehension. Further on, regression analysis are used to determine the component with the greatest impact on reading comprehension. Results: Correlation as well as regression analysis reveal word recognition as a specific skill with the strongest influence on reading comprehension skills in students with special educational needs. Conclusion: Enhancing reading comprehension in late primary school students should especially focus on (automatized) word recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The type of masking noise is known to affect speech identification. Some maskers are known to have a greater masking effect on speech than others. Thus, the study aimed to investigate whether manipulating the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of a masker can compensate for variations in word identification scores obtained due to change in the type of masker. To investigate this, the scores obtained by 20 children on a speech identification test using an 8-talker babble was compared with that obtained on a word identification test in the presence of white noise. The former test was evaluated at 0 dB SNR using the 'Speech perception-in-noise in Kannada' (SPIN-K) and the latter in three different SNRs (0 dB, -5 dB, & -10 dB) using the 'Kannada Word identification-in-white noise' (WIWN-K). Speech babble was found to have a greater masking effect at 0 dB SNR, resulting in poorer speech identification scores than white noise. However, the speech identification scores obtained using white noise at -10 dB SNR was equivalent to that of scores obtained with speech babble at 0 dB SNR. The study highlights that the masking effect of continuous white noise can be made equivalent to the masking effect of an 8-talker speech babble by reducing the SNR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous studies have provided evidence that readers generate phonological codes while reading. However, a central question in much of this research has been how early these codes are generated. Answering this question has implications for the roles that phonological coding might play for skilled readers, especially whether phonological codes affect the identification of most words, which can only be the case if these codes are generated rapidly. To investigate the time course of phonological coding during silent reading, the present series of experiments examined survival analyses of first-fixation durations on phonologically related (homophones, pseudohomophones) and orthographic control (orthographically matched words and nonwords) stimuli that were either embedded in sentences in place of correct targets (Experiments 1 and 2) or presented as parafoveal previews for correct targets using the boundary paradigm (Experiments 3 and 4). Survival analyses revealed a discernible difference between processing the phonologically related versus the orthographic control items by as early as 160 ms from the start of fixation on average (160-173 ms across experiments). Because only approximately 18% of first fixation durations were shorter than these mean estimates and follow-up tests revealed that earlier divergence point estimates were associated with shorter gaze durations (e.g., more rapid word identification), results suggest that skilled readers rapidly generate phonological codes during normal, silent reading and that these codes may affect the identification of most words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Word identification is influenced by the semantic context in spoken comprehension. • We used the RSVP-flanker paradigm to examine this issue when reading a text. • The Parafoveal N400 effect was delayed in the semantically cohort violated condition. • Semantic context influences parafoveal word processing precedes word identification. Previous event-related potential (ERP) studies have shown that the N400 effect tracks with the isolation point of a word in spoken language comprehension. These results suggested the semantic context of a sentence influences word processing before word identification. However, this delayed effect of N400 latency is not often the case in written language comprehension. The present study combined ERP with a rapid serial visual presentation with flanker (RSVP-flanker) method to examine this issue when words were presented in the parafovea. We manipulated three kinds of critical words: expected (EXP), semantically violated (VIO) and semantically cohort violated (COH-VIO). The ERP results showed that the parafoveal N400 effect was delayed in the contrast of COH-VIO vs. EXP than the contrast of VIO vs. EXP. These results suggested that the semantic context influences parafoveal word processing before word identification in written language comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Dominant explanations of reading fluency indicate automatic phonological decoding frees mental resources for processing meaning. However, decoding automaticity does not guarantee attention to meaning. Recent neurocognitive work suggests executive functioning (EF) may contribute to fluency beyond decoding automaticity.Aims: Two studies examined contributions of an understudied EF, cognitive flexibility, to fluent reading and tested a teacher-administered EF intervention to improve fluency in teacher-identified low-achieving (LA) readers.Methods and Procedures: Study 1 assessed word reading fluency, automatic decoding, reading comprehension, verbal and nonverbal ability, and reading-specific and domain-general cognitive flexibility in 50 1st and 2nd grade typically-developing (TD) readers. Study 2 compared TD and LA readers' cognitive flexibility and examined effectiveness of cognitive flexibility intervention for improving fluency in 33 LA 2nd and 3rd graders.Outcomes and Results: Reading-specific flexibility contributed to fluency beyond automatic decoding and all other control variables in TD readers who had significantly higher cognitive flexibility than LA readers. Teacher-administered EF intervention improved reading fluency for LA readers.Conclusions and Implications: These findings expand understanding of the neurocognitive basis of reading fluency and add to the growing body of evidence that EF underlies learning differences and serves as a useful target of intervention for LA students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Response to Intervention (RtI) has brought about significant changes in the way schools provide educational support for students at risk for reading difficulty. Much of the research on RtI has focused on evidence-based interventions that are typically offered outside of the regular classroom, with less attention given to instruction that is part of the core curriculum. In this article, the author describes an explicit approach to word solving instruction that has been key to an intervention proven effective in contexts outside of the classroom. The approach emphasizes the interactive and confirmatory use of both code-based and meaning-based strategies for figuring out words. The author offers guidance for using a gradual release of responsibility model to incorporate this explicit approach into small-group instruction in primary classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The efficacy of audiovisual (AV) integration is reflected in the degree of cross-modal suppression of the auditory event-related potentials (ERPs, P1-N1-P2), while stronger semantic encoding is reflected in enhanced late ERP negativities (e.g., N450). We hypothesized that increasing visual stimulus reliability should lead to more robust AV-integration and enhanced semantic prediction, reflected in suppression of auditory ERPs and enhanced N450, respectively. EEG was acquired while individuals watched and listened to clear and blurred videos of a speaker uttering intact or highly-intelligible degraded (vocoded) words and made binary judgments about word meaning (animate or inanimate). We found that intact speech evoked larger negativity between 280–527-ms than vocoded speech, suggestive of more robust semantic prediction for the intact signal. For visual reliability, we found that greater cross-modal ERP suppression occurred for clear than blurred videos prior to sound onset and for the P2 ERP. Additionally, the later semantic-related negativity tended to be larger for clear than blurred videos. These results suggest that the cross-modal effect is largely confined to suppression of early auditory networks with weak effect on networks associated with semantic prediction. However, the semantic-related visual effect on the late negativity may have been tempered by the vocoded signal’s high-reliability.

Identifying individual words is an essential part of the reading process that should occur first so that understanding the structural relations between words and comprehending the sentence as a whole may take place. Therefore, lexical processing (or word identification) has received much attention in the literature, with many researchers exploring the effects of different aspects of word representation (orthographic, phonological, and semantic information of words) in word identification. While the influence of many orthographic and phonological factors in normal reading are well researched and understood (Rayner, 1998, 2009), the effect of semantic characteristics of a word in its identification has received relatively less attention. A complete account of lexical processing during normal reading requires understanding the role of word meaning in lexical processing. Currently, little is understood about whether and how the meaning of an individual word is extracted during early stages of word identification. This article primarily focuses on how word meaning contributes to the process of word identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our understanding of the cognitive processes involved in reading has been advanced by computational models that simulate those processes (e.g., see Reichle, 2015). Unfortunately, most of these models have been developed to explain the reading of English and other alphabetic languages, with relatively fewer efforts to examine whether or not the assumptions of these models also explain what has been learned from other languages and, in particular, non-alphabetic writing systems like Chinese (e.g., see Li, Zang, Liversedge, & Pollatsek, 2015). In this article, we will review those computational models that have been developed to explain the reading of Chinese, with the goal of comparing their theoretical assumptions to those of models that explain the reading of English. Our analysis indicates that there are both points of convergence and divergence between the theoretical assumptions of Chinese versus English models, suggesting that the cognitive systems supporting reading may be differentially influenced by features of the languages and/or writing systems, or that certain theoretical assumptions developed to explain the reading of one language might be adapted to explain the reading of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study examined statistically significant differences between struggling and adequate readers using a multicomponent model of reading comprehension in 796 sixth through eighth graders, with a primary focus on word reading and vocabulary. Path analyses and Wald tests were used to investigate the direct and indirect relations of word identification, vocabulary, silent reading efficiency, and inference-making on reading comprehension. Comparing struggling versus adequate comprehenders revealed statistically significant differences in path coefficients. In both groups, vocabulary had the largest total effect when considering its direct and indirect effects. Word identification was the strongest direct predictor for struggling comprehenders (β = .18 for struggling vs. β = − .03 for adequate), while vocabulary was the strongest predictor for adequate comprehenders (β = .40 for adequate vs. β = .14 for struggling). Findings reinforce (a) vocabulary knowledge plays a primary role in explaining individual differences in adolescent reading comprehension, (b) the need to differentiate intervention to address underlying difficulties of struggling readers, and (c) the relations of reading component skills (e.g., word reading and silent reading efficiency) to reading comprehension may be different based on reader proficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese reading experiments have introduced important caveats to theories of reading that have been largely informed by studies of English reading – especially in relation to our understanding of lexical processing and eye-movement control. This article provides a brief primer on Chinese reading and examples of questions that arise from its study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]