Contextual facilitation in children's oral reading in relation to grade and decoding skill

This research investigated children's use of context to facilitate word recognition and comprehension-monitoring processes in the oral reading of connected prose as a function of grade level and decoding skill. Results indicated no overall contextual facilitation of word recognition accuracy, even in less skilled decoders, although there was evidence that less skilled decoders were assisted by context in decoding some content words. Children read word lists 50% more slowly than comparable selections of prose. The adoption of different and compensatory reading speed strategies in children's reading of prose and word lists renders the oral reading task an insensitive test of the contextual facilitation of word recognition accuracy. A qualitative analysis of the errors made in reading the prose passage showed that skilled decoders made (relative to less skilled decoders) a lower proportion of reading errors which, as first uttered, violated prior context, and a higher rate of contextually obligatory self-corrections, thus making a higher overall rate of contextually acceptable oral reading errors. These data were interpreted as suggesting that children's oral reading incorporates processing that occurs after lexical access, and that skilled decoders use context more effectively to monitor comprehension. In an oral reading task, this may counteract the tendency of less skilled decoders to rely more on context in the process of word recognition.     

Poor reading comprehension despite fast word decoding in children with hydrocephalus

Children with hydrocephalus decode words better than they understand what they read. We tested whether children with hydrocephalus (from myelomeningocele or aqueduct stenosis) (1) decode words slowly, (2) use decoding processes similar to those of neurologically intact peers, and (3) comprehend poorly to the extent that they are slow decoders. We compared speed of word decoding in 33 children with hydrocephalus and 33 controls matched on a pairwise basis for age, grade, and word decoding accuracy. The children with hydrocephalus were as fast as controls in reading words, but, unlike controls, they did not demonstrate an effect of spelling-sound regularity. Further, decoding speed did not contribute to reading comprehension beyond word decoding accuracy. The reading comprehension deficits of good decoders with hydrocephalus are not related to early-stage processing deficits in word recognition speed. Likely origins of comprehension failure in this group are discussed.     

Corrective Feedback in Oral Reading

We examined 24 studies to determine the effects on word recognition and reading comprehension of correcting errors during oral reading. Corrective feedback improved students' word reading accuracy on words in lists, and accuracy in reading words in passages. Some correction procedures had greater benefits than others. Successful error correction procedures share common characteristics, leading to recommendations about instruction: Teachers should (a) correct errors immediately; (b) require students to repeat the correct response; and (c) match correction procedure to the instructional situation and the learner. Several research recommendations are outlined.     

Global,component, and serial processing of printed words in beginning reading

Nonreaders (end of kindergarten) and beginning readers (end of first grade) were compared. Both nonreaders and beginning readers imposed integral perceptual structures on shape/terminal letter information and configural perceptual structures on medial letter information: visual attention varied as a function of the unit of visual information but not as a function of learning to read. Nonreaders remembered a word more accurately than a letter in a word, showing visual origins of the word superiority effect. Beginning readers remembered a word faster than a letter in a word, which they remembered faster than a letter sequence in a word, suggesting early origins of the word priority effect. Only gains in memory for a letter sequence correlated with gains in word decoding. Throughout first grade, sentence verification was faster, not more accurate, when sentences were presented normally compared to one word at a time; repeated exposure of a word in parafoveal and foveal vision facilitates speed but not accuracy of comprehension. Results are discussed in reference to a model of global, component, and serial procedures.     

The role of discourse context in developing word form representations: a paradoxical relation between reading and learning

To acquire representations of printed words, children must attend to the written form of a word and link this form with the word's pronunciation. When words are read in context, they may be read with less attention to these features, and this can lead to poorer word form retention. Two experiments with young children (ages 5-8 years) confirmed this hypothesis. In our experiments, children attempted to read words they could not previously read, during a self-teaching period, either in context or in isolation. Later they were tested on how well they learned the words as a function of self-teaching condition (isolation or context). Consistent with previous research, children read more words accurately in context than in isolation during self-teaching; however, children had better retention for words learned in isolation. Furthermore, this benefit from learning in isolation was larger for less skilled readers. This effect of poorer word retention when words are learned in context is paradoxical because context has been shown to facilitate word identification. We discuss factors that may influence this effect of context, especially the role of children's skill level and the demands of learning new word representations at the beginning of reading instruction.     

The role of vowels and context in the reading of highly skilled native Arabic readers

The role of context and vowels among highly skilled native Arabic readers was investigated in this study. Sixty-eight high school participants were selected after reading a list of isolated words. Only the highly skilled students participated in this study. Each participant individually had to read aloud vowelized and unvowelized paragraphs, and vowelized and unvowelized lists of words. The results showed that vowels and context were significant facilitators of word recognition in Arabic orthography.     

Reading skill and the identification of words in discourse context

Word identification latencies and word prediction accuracy were compared for groups of skilled and less skilled young readers in three experiments. In each experiment, discourse context reduced identification latencies for less skilled as well as skilled readers. This was true both when context was heard and when it was read. The general relationship between word predictability and latency was the same for skilled readers and for less skilled readers, but only less skilled readers’ identification latencies were affected by word length and word frequency when the word appeared in context. When subjects predicted the word before identifying it, correctly predicted words were identified more quickly than words not predicted correctly, and skilled readers were more accurate in prediction than were less skilled readers. Although reading-related differences in the use of discourse context may characterize other aspects of reading comprehension, the use of context in identifying words is not a major source of reading difficulty.     

Founder of the Journal of Genetic Psychology

Fifteen college-level readers (2 men and 13 women) were given 34 passages from the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) for reading. During reading, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from the midline sites (Fz, Cz, and Pz) of the participants' scalps. The first 17 passages were read by the participants at their own natural rate (self-paced condition). The second 17 passages were read at a fast-paced rate determined by the fastest reading rate recorded on an adequately comprehended trial from the preceding passages. Results indicated that accelerating reading rate increased the readers' comprehension. Additionally, the increase in reading rate and improvement in comprehension were reflected in the ERP measures. This finding confirms this study's assumption that there is a disparity between reading ability and routine performance, and that this disparity is manifested in measures of neurocognitive functioning as reflected by the ERPs. Specifically, the ERP waveforms discriminated not only reading rate (specifically manifested by differences in speed of processing), but also the level of comprehension attained by the participants.     

Supporting Fourth-Grade Students' Word Identification Using Application Software

A quasi-experimental study examined effects of a 10-week word structure intervention with fourth-grade students. During daily 10–15-minute practice periods, students worked individually with mobile apps focused on specific aspects of word identification. Pre- and post-treatment assessments showed no differences in rate and accuracy of oral reading between groups that did and did not use the apps, with little effect on motivation to read. Some differences were found in level of texts read and in spelling favoring the intervention students. However, practical significance was found in gains in percentile rank scores on standardized vocabulary and comprehension measures.     

Detection errors onthe andand: Evidence for reading units larger than the word

In five experiments, subjects read lO0-word passages and circled instances of a given target letter, letter group, or word. In each case subjects made a disproportionate number of detection errors on the common function wordsthe andand. The predominance of errors on these two words was reduced for passages in which the words were placed in an inappropriate syntactic context and for passages in which word-group identification was disturbed by the use of mixed typecases or a list, rather than a paragraph, format. These effects for the wordand were not found for the control wordant. These results were taken as evidence that familiar word sequences may be read in units larger than the word, probably short syntactic phrases or word frames. A tentative model of the reading process consistent with these results is proposed.     

Examining misses in reading aloud repeated words

This study examined a novel task in which participants read aloud passages shown two words per line on a computer screen. There were four different passages, all of which included unrelated sentences, with each sentence containing one test word. The passages differed only in the text type (prose, scrambled) and in the identity of the test word (the, one). The word the is a common function word, whereas one is a less common content word. The test word was repeated in half of the sentences at the end of one line and at the start of the following line. Many more misses in reading aloud occurred on the than on one, especially for prose passages; almost all misses involved repeated words. These results were interpreted in terms of hypotheses and models that have been proposed for the letter-detection task. Specifically, it is concluded that reading aloud is influenced by structural processes that differentiate between function and content words.     

Accounting for children's orthographic learning while reading text: do children self-teach?

Share's "self-teaching" model proposes that readers acquire most knowledge about the orthographic structure of words incidentally while reading independently. In the current study, the self-teaching hypothesis was tested by simulating everyday reading through the use of real words, analyzing the effects of context, and considering the independent contributions of general cognitive ability, including rapid naming ability and prior orthographic knowledge. A total of 35 first graders read short story passages in English embedded with target words representative of words likely to be known orally but not orthographically. Words were manipulated for target word spelling and contextual support. According to the self-teaching model, words correctly decoded during reading should be correlated with subsequent orthographic learning. The results of this study confirmed this prediction. Self-teaching was evidenced through significantly higher proportions of correctly identified target words across context conditions. Regression analyses showed that individual differences were related to prior orthographic knowledge and predicted students' degree and quality of orthographic learning after controlling for general decoding ability.     

The embodiment of emotional words in a second language: An eye-movement study

The hypothesis that word representations are emotionally impoverished in a second language (L2) has variable support. However, this hypothesis has only been tested using tasks that present words in isolation or that require laboratory-specific decisions. Here, we recorded eye movements for 34 bilinguals who read sentences in their L2 with no goal other than comprehension, and compared them to 43 first language readers taken from our prior study. Positive words were read more quickly than neutral words in the L2 across first-pass reading time measures. However, this emotional advantage was absent for negative words for the earliest measures. Moreover, negative words but not positive words were influenced by concreteness, frequency and L2 proficiency in a manner similar to neutral words. Taken together, the findings suggest that only negative words are at risk of emotional disembodiment during L2 reading, perhaps because a positivity bias in L2 experiences ensures that positive words are emotionally grounded.     

What is the optimal position of low-frequency words across line boundaries? An eye movement investigation

When displaying text on a page or a screen, only a finite number of characters can be presented on a single line. If the text exceeds that finite value, then text wrapping occurs. Often this process results in longer, more difficult to process words being positioned at the start of a line. We conducted an eye movement study to examine how this artefact of text wrapping affects passage reading. This allowed us to answer the question: should word difficulty be used when determining line breaks? Thirty-nine participants read 20 passages where low-frequency target words were either line-initial or line-final. There was no statistically reliable effect of our manipulation on passage reading time or comprehension despite several effects at a local level. Regarding our primary research question, the evidence suggests that word difficulty may not need to be accounted for when determining line breaks and assigning words to new lines.     

Meaning construction and integration in children with hydrocephalus

Text comprehension processes were investigated in children with hydrocephalus, a neurodevelopmental disorder associated with good word decoding, but deficient reading comprehension. In Experiment 1, hydrocephalus and control groups were similar in processes related to activating word meanings and using context to enhance meaning. The hydrocephalus group was poorer at suppressing contextually irrelevant meanings. In Experiment 2, the hydrocephalus group had difficulty integrating information from an earlier read sentence to understand a new sentence as textual distance between the two propositions increased, suggesting difficulty in reactivation processes related to comprehension. Results are discussed in relation to cognitive and neurocognitive models of comprehension.     

The Effects of Two Different Reading Acceleration Training Programs on Improving Reading Skills of Second Graders

It has been well established that poor reading skills in the first grades of primary school can lead to poor reading skills in all coming years. A reading acceleration program (RAP) known to improve reading skills in adults and children with and without reading difficulties (RD) was tested for its effect on children in second grade with standard reading skills. The influence of the RAP on improving all reading skills—decoding, fluency, and reading comprehension—was examined. Seventy-nine children in second grade were divided into two study groups and one control group. Each study group received a training program that emphasizes reading skills: decoding, fluency, and comprehension were trained at the levels of words and sentences in Version A and at the levels of words and paragraphs in Version B. Both programs significantly improved reading skills compared with the control group that was not trained: Group A improved word fluency whereas Group B improved accuracy measures (word, pseudo-word, and text). Both training groups showed significantly greater improvement over time than the control group on reading comprehension. We conclude that a RAP training that combines words, sentences, and paragraphs is the most effective for improving reading skills.     

Skills of divided attention

Two subjects read short stories while writing lists of words at dictation. After some weeks of practice, they were able to write words, discover relations among dictated words, and categorize words for meaning, while reading for comprehension at normal speed. The performance of these subjects is not consistent with the notion that there are fixed limits to attentional capacity.     

汉语儿童读词者的认知特征及其影响因素

读词者是指能够流畅地进行字词识别和解码, 却难以很好地理解文本内容的学生。以840名小学一到六年级学生为研究对象, 对其进行阅读速度、阅读理解、语素意识(包括同音语素意识、同形语素意识和复合语素意识)、汉字识别、口语词汇、工作记忆、一般智力等测查, 通过现状描述和多分类logistic回归分析, 结果发现：(1)一年级汉语儿童读词者的检出率为0.7%, 二年级之后的检出率在6.5%~10.1%之间; (2)在语言特异性认知因素上, 控制了年龄和智力后, 与其他学生相比, 读词者在汉字识别任务上表现较好, 在语素意识各个任务及口语词汇上表现较差; (3)年龄和智力是造成读词者比率增加的一般因素; (4)同音语素意识和口语词汇是造成读词者比率增加的语言特异性认知因素。     

学龄早期词语阅读习得对阅读理解能力的预测作用：初始水平和发展速率的贡献

本研究测查了183名儿童在一年级期间（学年初,学年中,学年末）的词语阅读能力（词语解码,阅读流畅性）及一年级末和二年级末的阅读理解能力,采用分层线性模型估计每名儿童在一年级期间词语阅读能力的初始水平和发展速率,以考察二者对阅读理解能力的独立预测作用。结果表明,词语识别的初始水平和增长速率都能独立预测一年级末和二年级末的阅读理解能力,阅读流畅性的初始水平和增长速率只能独立预测二年级末的阅读理解能力,但可以预测阅读理解能力在一年级到二年级的增长。