Does a prototypical argumentative schema exist? Text recall in 8 to 13 years olds

120 students in grades 3 to 7 (aged 8 to 13) heard an argumentative text and were immediately submitted to a free recall task. The results show that before grade 7, the subjects did not view the text as argumentative. The discussion centers on the relevancy of a prototypical argumentative schema in accounting for these findings.     

The readability of educational materials written for parents of children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder

Health-care providers are relying increasingly on printed materials to educate patients and their families about varous aspects of their health or mental health conditions. For the target audience to be able to read and understand health brochures, they should be written at or about the 8th-grade level and incorporate variables that facilitate comprehension. The purpose of this study was to analyze brochures related to Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder to determine (a) if they were written at a level appropriate for the target audience, and (b) the extent to which they incorporated variables identified in the research literature as facilitating comprehension. The results showed that the brochures were written at a reading level beyond that of the target audience. Further, although the brochures incorporated a large number of variables which facilitate comprehension, many were not used to the extent necessary to ensure that readers would be able to understand the brochures. These results clearly indicated the need for health care materials to be written in such a way that they can be read and understood by the target audience.     

PEER TUTORING WITH OR WITHOUT HOME-BASED REINFORCEMENT,FOR READING REMEDIATION

An operant-based corrective reading program was established to study effectiveness of peer tutoring in the school, for reading deficient children. Sixty-nine second to fourth grade students were matched on measures of initial reading ability and level of reading retardation, and randomly assigned to three groups: Peer Tutoring Only, Peer Tutoring with Home Based Reinforcement, and Control. SRA materials were used in training for the experimental groups, supplemented with additional reading materials. The program continued for 15 weeks, in seven public schools. Changes in oral reading accuracy and comprehension were assessed. Both reading and comprehension were significantly increased by peer tutoring, relative to the control group. The addition of home-based reinforcement doubled this increase. The measured gain in oral reading, based upon standardized testing, was 0.19 years for the controls and 1.27 years for peer tutoring with home-based reinforcement. Internal measures of gain showed similar results, and comprehension gains were also comparable. A high rate of compliance with the tutoring program was maintained by the tutors. High ratings of satisfaction were obtained for the program, from all groups of participants. The feasibility of the program for application in the school system is discussed.     

Do early lexical skills predict language outcome at 3 years? A longitudinal study of French-speaking children

Early language development is considered critical for children’s adjustment in school, for social adaptation and for later educational achievement. Despite the role of children’s receptive skills as a foundation for later productive word use, receptive language skills have received surprisingly little attention. The present research extends recent work on the prediction of preschool language skills by exploring whether a decontextualized measure of lexical comprehension can account for unique variance in preschool language skills above and beyond parent report and how early such a prediction can be made. For this purpose, 65 French-speaking children have been tested at 16, 22, 29 and 36 months.The results of the current study suggest that up to the age of two, although parent reports of lexical comprehension and/or production account for a portion of variance in later receptive, productive or general language outcome, they have less predictive validity than a direct measure of early lexical comprehension. By contrast, after age two, parent reported vocabulary production is the strongest predictor of later language production skills.     

Information Integration in Modulation of Pragmatic Inferences During Online Language Comprehension

Upon hearing a scalar adjective in a definite referring expression such as “the big…,” listeners typically make anticipatory eye movements to an item in a contrast set, such as a big glass in the context of a smaller glass. Recent studies have suggested that this rapid, contrastive interpretation of scalar adjectives is malleable and calibrated to the speaker's pragmatic competence. In a series of eye‐tracking experiments, we explore the nature of the evidence necessary for the modulation of pragmatic inferences in language comprehension, focusing on the complementary roles of top–down information ‐ (knowledge about the particular speaker's pragmatic competence)  and bottom‐up cues  (distributional information about the use of scalar adjectives in the environment). We find that bottom‐up evidence alone (e.g., the speaker says “the big dog” in a context with one dog), in large quantities, can be sufficient to trigger modulation of the listener's contrastive inferences, with or without top‐down cues to support this adaptation. Further, these findings suggest that listeners track and flexibly combine multiple sources of information in service of efficient pragmatic communication.     

中文阅读中副中央凹区域文本信息加工时程的眼动研究

副中央凹文本对阅读有非常重要的作用,考察读者在注视何时起对其加工有助于解决阅读中词汇加工方式的理论问题,当前研究结果存在很大争论。本研究采用消失文本范式,操纵词n-1和n+1的呈现时间(0m/40ms),考察读者加工两侧副中央凹信息的时程。结果发现,相比0ms,在注视早期40ms内,词n+1的呈现能够显著促进阅读加工,而词n-1未对阅读产生影响,表明右侧副中央凹信息的加工发生在注视早期,而左侧则未发生在该早期阶段。结果支持阅读眼动控制的并列加工模型。