Investigating the Reliability of the Sentence Verification Technique

Reading comprehension plays an important role in achievement for all academic domains. The purpose of this study is to describe the sentence verification technique (SVT) (Royer, Hastings, &; Hook, 1979 Royer, J. M., Hastings, C. N., &; Hook, C. (1979). A sentence verification technique for measuring reading comprehension. Journal of Reading Behavior, 11(4), 355–363. doi:10.1080/10862967909547341[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) as an alternative method of assessing reading comprehension, which can be used with a variety of texts and across diverse populations and educational contexts. Additionally, this study adds a unique contribution to the extant literature on the SVT through an investigation of the precision of the instrument across proficiency levels. Data were gathered from a sample of 464 fourth-grade students from the Northeast region of the United States. Reliability was estimated using one, two, three, and four passage test forms. Two or three passages provided sufficient reliability. The conditional reliability analyses revealed that the SVT test scores were reliable for readers with average to below average proficiency, but did not provide reliable information for students who were very poor or strong readers.     

Early understanding of the socially mediated representational function of pictures

The present two studies investigated whether toddlers’ ability to use pictures in problem solving could be facilitated by making available the social context in which pictures were created. To make this social context available, we introduced an Experimental treatment in which the creator was intentionally drawing different objects. In Experiment-1, due to this treatment, children performed better in the Test in which the Experimenter was drawing the Test-pictures of the retrieval task. In Experiment-2, after the same Experimental treatment the facilitative effect was replicated although the social context was removed in the Test phase by using pre-drawn Test-pictures without any drawing action in the retrieval task. The results suggest that a treatment which offers the opportunity to understand the socially mediated representational function of pictures enables children to perform better when contextualizing pictures in current reality. These two experiments revealed a novel way to facilitate children’s picture comprehension by identifying an underlying factor that can explain children’s difficulty in picture comprehension.     

Relevance theory,pragmatic inference and cognitive architecture

Relevance Theory (RT) argues that human language comprehension processes tend to maximize “relevance,” and postulates that there is a relevance-based procedure that a hearer follows when trying to understand an utterance. Despite being highly influential, RT has been criticized for its failure to explain how speaker-related information, either the speaker’s abilities or her/his preferences, is incorporated into the hearer’s inferential, pragmatic process. An alternative proposal is that speaker-related information gains prominence due to representation of the speaker within higher level goal-directed schemata. Yet the goal-based account is still unable to explain clearly how cross-domain information, for example linguistic meaning and speaker-related knowledge, is integrated within a modular system. On the basis of RT’s cognitive requirements, together with contemporary cognitive theory, we argue that this integration is realized by utilizing working memory and that there exist conversational constraints with which the constructed utterance interpretation should be consistent. We illustrate our arguments with a computational implementation of the proposed processes within a general cognitive architecture.

Abbreviations: ACT-R Adaptive Control of Thought - RationalCOGENT Cognitive Objects within a Graphical ENvironmenTCS/SS Contention Scheduling/Supervisory SystemRBCP Relevance-Based Comprehension ProcedureRT Relevance Theory     

The influence of thinking dispositions on integration and recall of multiple texts

We investigated the association between thinking dispositions and two outcomes of multiple-texts comprehension: integration of conflicting information in argumentative essays; and recall of inferential information as an index of deep comprehension. We focused on two thinking dispositions, need for cognition (NFC) and actively open-minded thinking (AOT), as relevant individual differences in the processes involved in multiple-texts comprehension. NFC is the tendency to engage in and enjoy cognitively demanding activities, whereas AOT is the tendency to rationally evaluate arguments and supporting evidence, without being influenced by biases from one's own prior beliefs and prior knowledge. 73 university students completed perceived topic knowledge, perceived exposure to argumentative writing, and perceived competence in argumentative writing, NFC and AOT questionnaires, read two contradictory texts, wrote an argumentative essay, and recalled the information read 1 month later. Argumentative essays were assessed by length and level of integration of conflicting perspective. Text recalls were assessed by number of valid inferences included. Research questions were investigated through a path analysis model. The path analysis model had a good fit. NFC was indirectly associated with argumentation quality of the essay via the essay length. AOT was directly associated with the inferences included in the recall task. The present study contributes to the literature on multiple-texts comprehension by emphasizing the role of thinking dispositions.     

How does parallel language activation affect switch costs during trilingual language comprehension?

ABSTRACT

Declerck, M., Koch, I., Duñabeitia, J., Grainger, J., & Denise, N. [(2019). What absent switch costs and mixing costs during bilingual language comprehension can tell us about language control? Journal of Experimental Psychology Human Perception & Performance.] assumed that the absence of switch costs in bilingual language comprehension may be due to little degree of parallel language activation while substantial degree of it may lead to switch costs. This study tested this assumption by examining the switch costs during Russian-English-Chinese trilinguals’ performing lexical decision tasks in language pairs of L1–L2 in Experiment 1a, L1–L3 in Experiment 1b and L2–L3 in Experiment 1c. We found switch costs in L2 in Experiment 1a and switch costs in both L1 and L3 in Experiment 1b, but no switch costs in both L2 and L3 in Experiment 1c. These results generally provided evidence for the account.     

Predicting Reading Comprehension in Arabic-Speaking Middle Schoolers Using Linguistic Measures

Abstract

This study aimed at examining the contribution of various linguistic components to reading comprehension (RC) in the seventh and ninth grades and to compare this contribution between two groups: children with typical development and those with reading disorders (RD). This was done by testing the relative contribution of phonological awareness, morphological knowledge, vocabulary, and syntactic knowledge to RC in both groups. The regression analysis indicated that the linguistic components explain between 60 and 56% of the variance in RC in the seventh and ninth grades among the typical group and between 74 and 79% in the same grades among those with RD. While phonological awareness and morphological knowledge contribute to RC only among the RD group, the contributions of vocabulary and syntactic knowledge were found to be significant in both groups. The results are discussed in light of previous findings in the literature with theoretical and pedagogical implications.