EFFECTS OF ALTERNATIVE DELETION PATTERNS,BLANK CONDITIONS,AND SCORING SYSTEMS ON INTERMEDIATE LEVEL CLOZE TEST PERFORMANCE

The majority of cloze research has focused on a traditional test format whereby (1) deletions occur on an every‐nth word basis, (2) standard length blank spaces are provided, and (3) only exact word replacements of the original text receive credit. In this study, an analysis was made of the effects of selected deletion patterns (every‐nth versus total random), blank conditions (standard versus cued), and scoring modes (verbatim versus synonymic) on the cloze test performance of 64 sixth grade readers. Neither the deletion pattern nor blank condition main effects achieved significance; however, as expected, increased performance was observed for synonymic scoring. Most importantly, all first‐order interaction effects attained significance. In the total random/cued/ verbatim cloze format, context distances of less than four words generated correct responses as effectively as context distances of four, the equivalent of an every‐5th word deletion strategy. Further, this format exceeded all others in internal consistency and in its ranking of subjects' performance relative to their synonymic cloze test scores.     

EMTHODOLOGICAL CONCERNS IN EXPERIMENTAL READING RESEARCH: ALL THAT GLITTERS

The potential value of any piece of reading research rests squarely upon the merits of the methodology used to conduct the study. Regrettably, recent years have witnessed the emergence of trends in experimental methodology that deviate considerably from the hypothesis testing model upon which good science depends. This article describes the nature and consequences of liberally or improperly applying traditional research methodology and provides an argument for tempering judgments about the relative contributions that experimental studies make to the professional literature in reading     

Age-related declines in context maintenance and semantic short-term memory

This study reports age-related declines in context maintenance (Braver et al., 2001) and semantic short-term memory (STM) and evidence for a relation between the two. A group of younger and older adults completed a context maintenance task (AX-CPT), a semantically oriented STM task (conceptual span), a phonologically oriented STM task (digit span), and a meaning integration task (semantic anomaly judgement). In the AX-CPT task, a target response is required to the probe letter “X” but only when it is preceded by the letter “A” (the context). Either three (short interference) or six distractor letters (long interference) were presented between the cue and the probe. Results indicated an age-related deficit in context maintenance. Age-related declines were also observed for conceptual span and semantic anomaly judgement but not for digit span. Context maintenance was correlated with conceptual span and semantic anomaly judgement but not with digit span. These correlations were largely mediated by age differences, which also explained variance that was unique to (and not shared among) context maintenance, conceptual span, and semantic anomaly judgement.     

A computer model of the temporal course of agrammatic sentence understanding: The effects of variation in severity and sentence complexity

In this article, we present SYNCHRON, a computer model of Kolk and van Grunsven's (1985) hypothesis of agrammatic comprehension deficits. According to this hypothesis, parsing fails in agrammatic aphasies since syntactic representational elements that need to be active simultaneously are often not coactive because of disturbances in timing due to brain damage. SYNCHRON has been especially designed to account for two neglected aspects of agrammatic comprehension: degrees of severity and the sentence-complexity effect. We report an attempt to simulate data from two sentence-picture-matching studies in which a qualitatively similar sentence-complexity effect was found at two different average levels of severity. This pattern was reproduced when the timing disorder was assumed to affect syntactic phrasal categories, but not when it was assumed to affect function-word categories. When phrasal categories were involved, fit was not much affected, whether the damage was assumed to slow down the time for an element to be retrieved, or to decrease the time for an element to remain available.