The role of executive functions in bilingual children with reading difficulties

To explore the joint effect of reading difficulties (RD) and bilingualism on executive functions, 190 children of four groups of 9–12 year‐olds (41 bilinguals with RD, 45 monolinguals with RD, 45 bilinguals without RD, and 59 monolinguals without RD) were examined on the Concentration game, Tower of Hanoi, and Stroop as measures of executive functioning tapping into inhibitory/attentional control, working memory and planning ability. The most prominent finding was that in terms of RD, the speed of performances decreased dramatically. This general decrease was more pronounced for bilingual children with RD than for their monolingual counterparts. In conclusion, the findings suggest that while bilinguals gain more from executive functions in normal reading, they lose in terms of RD. Such an outcome confirms that executive functions are essential components of both reading and bilingualism, which depending on whether reading conditions are normal or difficult will produce cognitive advantages or disadvantages. Further, it is argued that dissimilarity between the Farsi and Swedish languages may complicate handling of such a situation.     

中文阅读中的字词激活模式:来自提示词边界延时效应的证据

研究采用眼动随动显示技术,通过操控提示正确/错误词边界线索的延迟时间,考察汉语阅读中汉字、词汇加工与词切分的时间特性。实验1发现,提示词n+1边界不影响总阅读时间,但能积极影响词兴趣区内的眼动数据,这种影响随着提示延迟时间的增加而逐步减弱;提示错误的词n+1的边界线索对总阅读时间的影响则随提示延迟时间的增加呈现倒"U"型的变化趋势。实验2发现,提示词n边界不影响总阅读时间,但却消极影响词兴趣区内的眼动数据,这种消极影响并没有随着提示延迟时间的增加而减弱;提示错误的词n边界对总阅读时间和眼动数据均产生消极的影响,且这种影响都随着提示延迟时间的增加而减弱。综合两项实验的结果可以推测,单一的向上反馈假设和整体假设都不能全面解释阅读中的字词加工过程,汉字加工与词汇加工间存在交互激活过程。     

A Lateral Reading of Religion: Christianity in Sister Relationships

Sociologists of religion continue to give precedence to parent–child transmission in studies on religion and family. In doing so, other kinds of family relationships that also influence religious beliefs and practices remain in the background. In this article, instead of using a vertical lens, religion in the family is approached through a lateral reading of sisters’ religious lives. Drawing on 13 biographical accounts, which included family diagrams and time-lines, conducted with adult women who identified as sisters and as Christian, this article examines the intersection of religion with practices of intimacy and social context. By looking laterally, this article explores the mutual shaping of religion and sibling ties and gives recommendations for the way this under-researched area can expand the sociological study of religion within families.     

Reading and related skills in Grades 6, 7, 8 and 9: French normative data from EVALEC

IntroductionTo appropriately assess reading difficulties, tests designed according to an appropriate theoretical framework and based on normative data are required.ObjectiveWe used EVALEC (Sprenger-Charolles, Colé, Béchennec, & Kipffer-Piquard, 2005) to collect data on the word-level reading skills and reading-related skills (phonemic awareness, phonological short-term memory, and rapid naming) of middle school children (Grades 6 to 9, about 80 in each grade).MethodIn the tests focused on word-level reading skills, the effects of regularity (regular vs. irregular words), lexicality, and length (short vs. long irregular words and pseudowords) were examined. Accuracy and processing times were recorded for all tests.ResultsThe effects of both regularity and lexicality were significant, whatever the measure and independently of grade. Both accuracy and speed were lower for longer pseudowords, whereas length did not have a significant effect on irregular word latencies and, surprisingly, long irregular words were read more accurately than short ones. Reading level as assessed by a standardized test (Lefavrais, 2005) was not predicted by phonological short-term memory; rapid naming (color names) and phonemic awareness were both predictors but, in both cases, only response times predicted reading level.ConclusionThese results, and particularly those from the reading tasks, are discussed in relation to models of written-word recognition developed to account for the reading of multisyllabic items (Perry, Ziegler, & Zorzi, 2010) in orthographies shallower than English (Perry, Ziegler, & Zorzi, 2014).     

The Word Superiority Effect in central and peripheral vision

The Word Superiority Effect (WSE) is a well-known phenomenon in reading research, where words are reported more accurately than single letters or non-words. We report two experiments that investigate the WSE in the central and peripheral visual field, as well as laterality differences in the perception of words and letters, using methods based on the Theory of Visual Attention. The results show a WSE in the central visual field, reflected in mean scores, perception thresholds, and processing speed, whereas the effect is eliminated or reversed in the periphery. This may be caused by crowding, which prevents lexical analysis of a word in the periphery. We conclude that perception of words and letters differs according to location in the visual field. Linking our results to previous studies of crowding effects in patients with reading impairments, we hypothesize that similar mechanisms may limit normal word peripheral processing.     

A model of saccadic landing positions in reading under the influence of sensory noise

During reading, saccadic eye movements are produced to move the high acuity foveal region of the eye to words of interest for efficient word processing. Distributions of saccadic landing positions peak close to a word's centre but are relatively broad compared to simple oculomotor tasks. Moreover, landing-position distributions are modulated both by distance of the launch site and by saccade type (e.g., one-step saccade, word skipping, refixation). Here we present a mathematical model for the computation of a saccade intended for a given target word. Two fundamental assumptions are related to (1) the sensory computation of the word centre from inter-word spaces and (2) the integration of sensory information and a priori knowledge using Bayesian estimation. Our model was developed for data from a large corpus of eye movements from normal reading. We demonstrate that the model is able simultaneously to account for a systematic shift of saccadic mean landing position with increasing launch-site distance and for qualitative differences between one-step saccades (i.e., from a given word to the next word) and word-skipping saccades.