The Action-Sentence Compatibility Effect: It's All in the Timing

When participants are asked to make sensibility judgments on sentences that describe action toward the body (i.e., "Mark dealt the cards to you") or away from the body (i.e., "You dealt the cards to Mark"), they are faster to respond when the response requires an arm movement in the same direction as the action described by the sentence. This congruence effect is known as the Action–Sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE). This study reports 4 experiments that extend our understanding of the ACE by exploring how the time at which one prepares the motor response required for the sensibility judgment affects the magnitude of the ACE. Results show that the ACE arises only when participants have the opportunity to plan their motor response while they are processing the sentence.     

Perception of auditory motion affects language processing

Previous reports have demonstrated that the comprehension of sentences describing motion in a particular direction (toward, away, up, or down) is affected by concurrently viewing a stimulus that depicts motion in the same or opposite direction. We report 3 experiments that extend our understanding of the relation between perception and language processing in 2 ways. First, whereas most previous studies of the relation between perception and language processing have focused on visual perception, our data show that sentence processing can be affected by the concurrent processing of auditory stimuli. Second, it is shown that the relation between the processing of auditory stimuli and the processing of sentences depends on whether the sentences are presented in the auditory or visual modality.     

A Time Course View of Sentence Priming Effects

Meaning activation was estimated during (standard naming) and after (delayed naming) target presentation to chart the time course of priming effects during reading comprehension. Using sentences biasing homographs toward their dominant and subordinate meanings, two experiments evaluated context effects across three naming-cue delays: immediate, baseline, baseline+600 ms all at a 0-ms interstimulus interval. When participants named a target immediately as it was presented, results converged with previous findings demonstrating initial context-sensitive meaning activation. The delayed naming conditions revealed little post-access influences for dominant contexts. Subordinate contexts, however, provided the strongest evidence of continued (or sustained) processing. It was concluded that context has immediate and automatic effects on initial meaning activation, after which, strategies are invoked for fine-tuning an interpretation of a sentence and integrating it with new information.     

Zero Anaphora: Transfer of Reference Tracking Strategies from Chinese to English

English contains many nominals that would be absent in Chinese because Chinese makes greater use of zero anaphora, which is an empty grammatical slot in a sentence standing for a previously mentioned referent. Native Chinese and native English speakers were compared in comprehending modified English passages from a standardized reading test with nominals deleted that would be absent in Chinese. In three experiments, Chinese speakers showed superior comprehension as measured by objective multiple-choice questions in this case, but not when no words were deleted or when nominals were deleted that would not be absent in Chinese. These results imply that native Chinese speakers develop reference tracking strategies that they transfer to comprehending English.This research was supported in part by United States Army Research Institute Contracts MDA903-93-K-0010, DASW01-96-K-0010, DASW01-99-K-0002, and DASW01-03-K-0002 to the University of Colorado (Alice Healy, Principal Investigator).We thank Lyle Bourne and Barbara Fox for stimulating discussions about this research. We are also grateful to the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado for their support of this research.Experiments 1 and 2 were reported at the International Conference on Functional Approaches to Grammar, Albuquerque, NM, July 25, 1995, and at the 37th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Chicago, IL, November 3, 1996, and all three experiments were reported at the 2001 American Association for Applied Linguistics conference, St. Louis, MO, February 24, 2001.     

An Assessment of Risk Understanding in Hispanic Genetic Counseling Patients

This study sought to identify if differences existed in risk comprehension and risk format understanding between genetic counseling patients of Hispanic and Caucasian ethnicity. A total of 107 questionnaires were collected, 56 from Hispanic patients, and 51 from Caucasian controls. Of the total population 41.1% (44/107) could not demonstrate sufficient risk understanding, which was 71.4% (40/56) of Hispanics and 7.8% (4/51) of Caucasians. Fractions were the best-understood format for all participants. However, both Hispanics and Caucasians had difficulties with the percentage risk format. Discrepancies were also noted in qualitative word format understanding. Awareness of differences in risk comprehension may affect the selection of counseling techniques and strategies utilized by genetic counselors when educating patients about risk related information.     

The Effect of Phonemic Repetition on Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution: Implications for Models of Working Memory

Two reading experiments investigated the extent to which the presence of phonemic repetition in sentences influenced processing difficulty during syntactic ambiguity resolution. In both experiments, participants read sentences silently as reading time was measured. Reading time on sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity was compared to reading time on unambiguous control sentences. Sentences either did or did not contain repeated phonemes. The results showed that reading time was longer for sentences containing a syntactic ambiguity than for unambiguous control sentences. Reading time was also longer on sentences containing repeated phonemes than on sentences that did not contain repeated phonemes. Phonemic repetition did not increase the time taken for syntactic ambiguity resolution; rather, the effects of syntactic ambiguity and phonemic repetition were temporally distinct, with the effect of phonemic repetition following the effect of syntactic ambiguity. Implications for theories of working memory are discussed.     

On-line story representation in boys with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) face an increased risk of poor achievement in school. Thus, knowledge of the cognitive processing abilities of children with ADHD is critical to understanding and improving their academic performance. Although many studies have focused on the specific nature of the attention deficit experienced by children with ADHD, few have examined higher order cognitive processing such as comprehension of stories. The present study examined the processes of encoding story information, building a story representation, and modifying a story representation in boys with ADHD and nonreferred boys. Boys were asked to narrate a story from a picture book twice. Boys with ADHD showed deficits in representing goals and goal plans in their narrations, as compared to nonreferred boys. Boys with ADHD also committed more errors than nonreferred boys, but did correct certain types of errors on their second telling. Implications are discussed in terms of future research needed to identify the cognitive deficits that account for these narrative deficits.     

Story Comprehension in Children with ADHD

A wealth of research is available examining children's story comprehension. However, little attention has been directed toward understanding the story comprehension of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The present paper attempts to integrate the developmental literature on children's story comprehension with the little that is known about the story comprehension processes of children with ADHD. This review is guided by a network model of story representation that emphasizes the structure of causal and enabling relations between story events. Examination of the available studies indicates that children with ADHD lag behind their peers in their understanding of causal relations, and that their attentional problems may contribute to difficulties in understanding factual information in the preschool years and causally related information in the elementary years. Some evidence also is presented suggesting that children with ADHD are less effective in taking advantage of story structure features in guiding their recall of story events. Suggestions for future research are offered that would elaborate our knowledge of the developmental progression in the processing of complex information by children with ADHD.     

What Eye Movements Reveal About Later Comprehension of Long Connected Texts

We know that reading involves coordination between textual characteristics and visual attention, but research linking eye movements during reading and comprehension assessed after reading is surprisingly limited, especially for reading long connected texts. We tested two competing possibilities: (a) the weak association hypothesis: Links between eye movements and comprehension are weak and short-lived, versus (b) the strong association hypothesis: The two are robustly linked, even after a delay. Using a predictive modeling approach, we trained regression models to predict comprehension scores from global eye movement features, using participant-level cross-validation to ensure that the models generalize across participants. We used data from three studies in which readers (Ns = 104, 130, 147) answered multiple-choice comprehension questions ~30 min after reading a 6,500-word text, or after reading up to eight 1,000-word texts. The models generated accurate predictions of participants' text comprehension scores (correlations between observed and predicted comprehension: 0.384, 0.362, 0.372, ps < .001), in line with the strong association hypothesis. We found that making more, but shorter fixations, consistently predicted comprehension across all studies. Furthermore, models trained on one study's data could successfully predict comprehension on the others, suggesting generalizability across studies. Collectively, these findings suggest that there is a robust link between eye movements and subsequent comprehension of a long connected text, thereby connecting theories of low-level eye movements with those of higher order text processing during reading.     

识字量和词汇知识在儿童阅读发展中的相对重要性

本研究基于简单阅读观理论,以两个样本共计666名大班至四年级的汉语儿童为研究对象,探索了识字量和词汇知识在儿童阅读能力发展中的作用及相对重要性的变化。结果显示,在阅读学习早期,识字量对阅读理解的重要性高于词汇知识。随着年级的升高,识字量的重要性降低,而词汇知识的重要性增加。这一发现证实简单阅读观理论也适用于解释汉语阅读能力的发展,并对今后的语文教学具有重要的启示意义。