A developmental study of proverb comprehension

Growth in proverb comprehension was hypothesized to result from the gradual emergence of cognitive abilities reflected in a sequence of increasingly complex abilities: story matching, transfer of relations, desymbolization, proverb matching, and paraphrase. Items for these abilities for each of 10 proverbs of two structural types were administered in three test sessions to 438 students in grades three to seven. An analogy subtest was used to measure general intelligence. ANOVA yielded significant main effects for grade, tasks, and proverbs (all p's less than .01). A significant task x proverb interaction (p less than .01) revealed the difficulty of precise control over the language of the items. Proverb structure had no measurable impact on difficulty. Analogy score was a significant factor in performance (p less than .01) but not as potent as age (p less than .01). The sequential order of abilities received only weak confirmation, though tasks did correlate among themselves with medium strength (r's = .50-.70). Individual interviews added a qualitative dimension to the findings. The suitability of cognitive hierarchical models for proverb comprehension was questioned.     

Talking about science interests: the importance of social recognition when students talk about their interests in STEM

Although interest development is often conceptualized as a process that occurs within an individual, interest can be developed through various social mechanisms. Messages that suggest that one is or is not welcome within a context may serve to bolster or attenuate interest in those contexts. In a sample of first semester freshmen undergraduate science students, we tested whether or not talking with close others about one’s interests, and receiving social recognition during those conversations, was related to having a greater science career interest over time. Our findings suggest that the way in which students perceive others’ reactions to their scientific interests (social recognition) during these conversations may have the greatest impact on students that face greater external barriers to persisting. We found that positive social recognition appraisals that convey that a listener understands and encourages one’s interest in science predicted a greater science career interest over time for women, but not men. The impact of positive social recognition appraisals on interest in a science career was greatest among women with relatively low or average science identities, but not for women with a relatively high science identity. The implications for the development of students’ interest and for broadening participation in science are discussed.

     

Reading comprehension and understanding idiomatic expressions: a developmental study

The aim of the present study was to investigate idiom comprehension in school-age Italian children with different reading comprehension skills. According to our hypothesis, the level of a child's text comprehension skills should predict his/her ability to understand idiomatic meanings. Idiom comprehension in fact requires children to go beyond a simple word-by-word comprehension strategy and to integrate figurative meaning into contextual information. In a preliminary phase, we used a standardized battery of tests (Cornoldi & Colpo, 1998) to assess the ability of second graders and fourth graders to comprehend written texts. Three groups were identified at each age level: good, medium, and poor comprehenders. Children were then presented with familiar idiomatic expressions which also have a literal meaning (e.g., "break the ice"). Idioms were embedded in short stories: in Experiment 1 only the idiomatic interpretation was contextually appropriate, in Experiment 2 a literal reading of the string was also plausible in the context. A multiple-choice task was used in both experiments: children were asked to choose one answer among three corresponding to: (a) the idiomatic meaning; (b) the literal meaning; and (c) an interpretation contextually appropriate but not connected with the idiomatic or literal meaning of the idiom string. The results of both experiments showed that the ability to understand a text indeed predicted children's understanding of idioms in context. To verify whether possible improvements in children's comprehension skills might produce an increase in figurative language understanding, Experiment 3 was carried out. A group of poor comprehenders who participated in Experiments 1 and 2 was tested eight months later. The results of Experiment 3 showed that children whose general comprehension skills improved their performance on an idiom comprehension test.     

Real-time comprehension processes in agrammatism: A case study

The ability of an agrammatic patient to construct structural syntactic and interpretative representations on-line was tested in two experiments. The first focused on global representations spanning an entire utterance, while the second examined lexical syntactic and semantic constraints on verb-argument relations. An off-line version of the second experiment was also carried out. There were two major findings. First, the patient could construct a semantic, but not syntactic, representation of an utterance. Second, he was much more dependent than normal upon pragmatic information. These results are discussed with respect to current claims about the nature of agrammatic comprehension deficits.     

Evoked potentials and the study of sentence comprehension

Evoked brain potentials were used to monitor moment-by-moment decisions during language comprehension. Subjects read sentences containing temporary syntactic ambiguities for which one of the possible interpretations was semantically implausible. The N400 component of the evoked potential, which is sensitive to implausibility, was used to discover when during a sentence subjects made a decision about the ambiguity. The results demonstrate that readers try to interpret a syntactic ambiguity early in a sentence rather than waiting for disambiguating information. This introduces a new way to use brain activity to study sentence comprehension processes.     

A retrospective longitudinal study of cognitive and language skills in poor reading comprehension

Fifty‐six specific poor reading comprehenders (SPRC) were selected in Grade 4 and retrospectively compared to good comprehenders at preschool (age 5) and at the end of kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2. The results revealed deficits in vocabulary, grammar, verbal memory and early deficits in phonological awareness in most of the SPRC sample, beginning in preschool. The reading comprehension deficits in children with SPRC were not as marked in earlier assessments in Grade 1 and 2, probably because of the greater dependence on word decoding in reading comprehension in the early grades.     

A politics of affect: Re/assembling relations of class and race at the museum

This article takes as its focus a politics of affect and its potentially transformative effects. Drawing on feminist new materialism and the process philosophy of Deleuze, I map moments in which this politics is enacted as school children encounter museum exhibits designed to address issues of class and race. Taking affect to be a matter of the capacity of bodies to affect and be affected, I attend to how the body's power of acting is increased or diminished through these encounters. Affect emerges as central to negotiations around issues relating to class and race, with some assemblages produced being particularly able to effect changes in capacities. Politics presents as a process of affective encounter through which dominant cultural norms of class and race can be contested and their exclusions ‘undone’. The argument is made that a politics of affect has the potential to unsettle normative power relations and address issues of social inequality and do so in an affirmative way. And, that attending to affect extends identity-based framings of class and race by bringing the constitutive role and contribution of the material, the micropolitical and the radically relational into view.     

A perceptual comparison: Stuttering and nonstuttering children''s nonstuttered speech

Recently, perceptual evaluation of the nonstuttered speech of stutterers has received renewed research interest. To summarize, the majority of research on this subject reported the nonstuttered speech of adult stutterers was perceptually identifiable from that produced by normal speaking individuals. A continuation of this line of research would be to determine if the nonstuttered speech of children would be equally recognizable. The results of this investigation would indicate this is not the case. The implications of the sophisticated judge's inability to identify stuttering children based on nonstuttered speech are discussed.     

Coloured filters and reading accuracy, comprehension and rate: a placebo-controlled study

Literature suggests that visuoperceptual deficits not normally assessed by eye examinations may be responsible for certain reading disabilities. Previous studies indicate that the use of nonoptical coloured filters may reduce these deficits and improve reading performance. Present research involved 49 participants with visuo-perceptual reading disabilities. Participants were divided into a control group who received no intervention, a placebo group who received filters in a colour complementary to the individual's optimal colour, and an experimental group who received specifically matched coloured filters. At posttest the experimental group reported statistically significantly fewer visual discomfort symptoms. The remainder of the results were, however, inconsistent. Some potential explanations are explored.     

Context effects in sentence comprehension: A study of the subjective lexicon

These studies explore the role of context in determining what information about the meanings of words is activated in memory at the time a word is encountered in a sentence. Using a color-naming paradigm, it was shown that both meanings of a word that has two distinct meanings are activated in memory at the time the word is heard in a sentence. This activation occurs even when there is sufficient contextual information to indicate which meaning was intended by the speaker. These results support the hypothesis that there exists in memory an isolable subjective lexicon. They suggest that context which is effective in disambiguating lexical ambiguities in the language has its effect only at a relatively late stage in the cognitive processing involved in language comprehension.     

Changing interests: A longitudinal study of intrinsic motivation for personally salient activities

The present longitudinal study extends the findings of earlier cross-sectional studies (Waterman, Schwartz, Green, Miller, & Philip, 2003) on the subjective experience of intrinsic motivation. University students generated lists of personally salient (identity-related) activities at the beginning of an academic semester and were asked to evaluate these activities at three points during the semester. Drawing on theories of intrinsic motivation, three subjective indices of intrinsic motivation (interest, flow experiences, and feelings of personal expressiveness) and three theoretically derived predictor variables (self-determination, the balance of challenges and skills, and self-realization values) were used in the present study. Cross-sectional relationships between the predictors and subjective experience indices at each timepoint replicated those observed in previous research. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to demonstrate that, as hypothesized, increases or decreases in the predictor variables between timepoints were associated with corresponding increases or decreases in the subjective experience indices. Implications for the study of intrinsic motivation are discussed.