Susan Ellis Weismer
Waisman Center, University of WisconsinMadison
Contact author: Hugh W. Catts, Department of Speech, Language, Hearing, 1000 Sunnyside Avenue, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, ...66045. Email: catts{at}ku.edu
PURPOSE: To examine concurrently and retrospectively the language abilities of children with specific reading comprehension deficits ("poor comprehenders") and compare them to typical readers and children with specific decoding deficits ("poor decoders").
METHOD: In Study 1, the authors identified 57 poor comprehenders, 27 poor decoders, and 98 typical readers on the basis of 8th-grade reading achievement. These subgroups' performances on 8th-grade measures of language comprehension and phonological processing were investigated. In Study 2, the authors examined retrospectively subgroups' performances on measures of language comprehension and phonological processing in kindergarten, 2nd, and 4th grades. Word recognition and reading comprehension in 2nd and 4th grades were also considered.
RESULTS: Study 1 showed that poor comprehenders had concurrent deficits in language comprehension but normal abilities in phonological processing. Poor decoders were characterized by the opposite pattern of language abilities. Study 2 results showed that subgroups had language (and word recognition) profiles in the earlier grades that were consistent with those observed in 8th grade. Subgroup differences in reading comprehension were inconsistent across grades but reflective of the changes in the components of reading comprehension over time.
CONCLUSIONS: The results support the simple view of reading and the phonological deficit hypothesis. Furthermore, the findings indicate that a classification system that is based on the simple view has advantages over standard systems that focus only on word recognition and/or reading comprehension.
KEY WORDS: poor comprehenders, specific reading comprehension deficit, simple view of reading, phonological processing, language comprehension deficits
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The twofold purpose of this meta-analysis was to determine the relative importance of decoding skills to reading comprehension in reading development and to identify which reader characteristics and ...reading assessment characteristics contribute to differences in the decoding and reading comprehension correlation. A meta-analysis of 110 studies found a sizeable average corrected correlation (r̄c = .74). Two reader characteristics (age and listening comprehension level) were significant moderators of the relationship. Several assessment characteristics were significant moderators, particularly for young readers: the way that decoding was measured and, with respect to the reading comprehension assessment, text genre; whether or not help was provided with decoding; and whether or not the texts were read aloud. Age and measure of decoding were the strongest moderators. We discuss the implications of these findings for assessment and the diagnosis of reading difficulties.
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Executive functioning (EF) refers to a set of higher order, core cognitive processes that facilitate planning, problem solving, and the initiation and maintenance of goal-directed behavior. Although ...recent research has established the importance of EF for word reading development in early childhood, few studies have investigated the role of EF in reading comprehension during middle childhood. This study investigated the relations between two specific dimensions of EF-attention shifting and inhibitory control-and reading comprehension for students in fourth grade (N = 120). Specifically, we used path analysis to investigate the direct, unique associations of attention shifting and inhibitory control with reading comprehension as well as the indirect associations with reading comprehension via language comprehension and word reading, controlling for working memory, processing speed, and phonological awareness. Results indicated that both attention shifting and inhibitory control demonstrated unique direct associations with reading comprehension. Attention shifting also demonstrated a significant indirect association via language comprehension. Findings support growing evidence for the importance of these EF dimensions to reading, raise questions about potential mechanisms underlying links between EF and reading comprehension, and offer implications for understanding and addressing reading comprehension difficulties.
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Reading and comprehending texts is challenging for students in higher education, especially when reading in English as a foreign language (EFL). An important component of efficient reading ...comprehension is the ability to accurately self-monitor understanding and performance, though most readers are not accurate at monitoring their comprehension.
This study investigated whether online, immediate and repetitive feedback on the process of calibration of comprehension, can improve comprehension monitoring when reading in native (L1) and foreign languages (FL), and whether such improvement can be generalized across languages.
Participants were 138 undergraduate Hebrew-English bilingual university students.
Monitoring accuracy was calculated through the paradigm of ‘calibration of comprehension’. Participants were divided into four study groups according to the language of reading (L1 or FL) and the exposure to feedback on calibration (with or without). Participants attended a total of five study sessions: a pre-exposure session, three exposure sessions and a fifth post-exposure session.
Only students who engaged with texts in the FL and received feedback showed improved monitoring accuracy. This improvement did not generalize to their L1.
Pedagogically, these results indicate that comprehension monitoring skills can be improved through online, immediate and repetitive feedback, especially in the FL. We suggest that FL comprehension was amenable to change because it met the optimal level of text difficulty to engage participants with the monitoring process. Thus, online feedback supported by digital technology may offer distinctive educational opportunities for bolstering comprehension monitoring.
•Online feedback improved comprehension monitoring in English as a foreign language.•Generalization effect across languages requires further research.•Online feedback can promote self-learning methods tailored to individual students.•Students should be taught to monitor their reading in each language they read.
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Neural oscillations track linguistic information during speech comprehension (Ding et al., 2016; Keitel et al., 2018), and are known to be modulated by acoustic landmarks and speech intelligibility ...(Doelling et al., 2014; Zoefel and VanRullen, 2015). However, studies investigating linguistic tracking have either relied on non-naturalistic isochronous stimuli or failed to fully control for prosody. Therefore, it is still unclear whether low-frequency activity tracks linguistic structure during natural speech, where linguistic structure does not follow such a palpable temporal pattern. Here, we measured electroencephalography (EEG) and manipulated the presence of semantic and syntactic information apart from the timescale of their occurrence, while carefully controlling for the acoustic-prosodic and lexical-semantic information in the signal. EEG was recorded while 29 adult native speakers (22 women, 7 men) listened to naturally spoken Dutch sentences, jabberwocky controls with morphemes and sentential prosody, word lists with lexical content but no phrase structure, and backward acoustically matched controls. Mutual information (MI) analysis revealed sensitivity to linguistic content: MI was highest for sentences at the phrasal (0.8-1.1 Hz) and lexical (1.9-2.8 Hz) timescales, suggesting that the delta-band is modulated by lexically driven combinatorial processing beyond prosody, and that linguistic content (i.e., structure and meaning) organizes neural oscillations beyond the timescale and rhythmicity of the stimulus. This pattern is consistent with neurophysiologically inspired models of language comprehension (Martin, 2016, 2020; Martin and Doumas, 2017) where oscillations encode endogenously generated linguistic content over and above exogenous or stimulus-driven timing and rhythm information.
Biological systems like the brain encode their environment not only by reacting in a series of stimulus-driven responses, but by combining stimulus-driven information with endogenous, internally generated, inferential knowledge and meaning. Understanding language from speech is the human benchmark for this. Much research focuses on the purely stimulus-driven response, but here, we focus on the goal of language behavior: conveying structure and meaning. To that end, we use naturalistic stimuli that contrast acoustic-prosodic and lexical-semantic information to show that, during spoken language comprehension, oscillatory modulations reflect computations related to inferring structure and meaning from the acoustic signal. Our experiment provides the first evidence to date that compositional structure and meaning organize the oscillatory response, above and beyond prosodic and lexical controls.
To increase reading volume and help students access challenging texts, the authors propose a four‐dimensional framework for text sets. The quad text set framework is designed around a target text: a ...challenging content area text, such as a canonical literary work, research article, or historical primary source document. The three remaining dimensions include visual texts (e.g., a video, pictures), informational texts to build students’ background knowledge and vocabulary, and an accessible young adult novel or current events article to help students engage with the topic. Working together, these texts can build students’ background knowledge, make the target text accessible to students, and also allow them to synthesize information across sources. The authors suggest that quad text sets are useful in English, science, and social studies classrooms.
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A growing body of research suggests that comprehension of expository texts presented digitally is a challenging endeavor, particularly for children. Many reading interventions, both from traditional ...classroom settings and computer-based contexts, have focused on much needed strategy instruction but have simultaneously neglected a focus on motivation. Alternatively, game-based learning environments (GBLEs) have the potential to simultaneously address both motivation and strategy use. Currently, there are few available GBLEs that target expository text comprehension. For this reason, this study employed a quasi-experimental between-subjects media comparison design to examine the effects of Missions with Monty, a GBLE supporting metacomprehension for expository science texts, on reading comprehension and motivation. Fifth-grade students ( N = 234) engaged with either Missions with Monty or a comparison, computer-based version of the program lacking gamified elements for a period of 6 weeks and were assessed on reading comprehension skills and five dimensions of reading motivation. Results indicated that students in the GBLE condition showed significantly greater improvements in reading comprehension ( g = 0.56), intrinsic motivation for reading ( g = 0.52), and curiosity ( g = 1.11) than their comparison-condition peers. Moreover, effects of the intervention on reading motivation were independent of prior reading comprehension for each of the reading motivation dimensions except reading efficacy. These findings support the notion that GBLEs can be an effective tool to foster digital expository text comprehension, particularly for struggling and uninterested readers. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: journal abstract)
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In this commentary, the author explores the tension between almost 30 years of work that has embraced increasingly complex conceptions of digital reading and recent studies that risk oversimplifying ...digital reading as a singular entity analogous with reading text on a screen. The author begins by tracing a line of theoretical and empirical work that both informs and complicates our understanding of digital literacy and, more specifically, digital reading. Then, a heuristic is proposed to systematically organize, label, and define a multifaceted set of increasingly complex terms, concepts, and practices that characterize the spectrum of digital reading experiences. Research that informs this heuristic is used to illustrate how more precision in defining digital reading can promote greater clarity across research methods and advance a more systematic study of promising digital reading practices. Finally, the author discusses implications for assessment, research, practice, and policy.
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Morphological awareness, or the knowledge and awareness of morphemes and morphological structures in a language, has been shown to be important to reading. The authors investigated multiple pathways ...by which compounding morphological awareness is related to reading comprehension: indirect pathways via vocabulary, word reading, and listening comprehension, as well as a direct relation. This question was addressed using data from 325 Chinese (Mandarin)-speaking second graders. The authors tested alternative structural equation models that compared variations of direct and indirect relations. Results revealed that the two predictors according to the simple view of reading, word reading and listening comprehension, explained 80% of the variance in reading comprehension. Importantly, compounding morphological awareness was directly related to reading comprehension, as well as indirectly via vocabulary, word reading, and listening comprehension. Together, they explained 87% of the total variance in reading comprehension. Moreover, the total effect of compounding morphological awareness on reading comprehension, after accounting for the direct effect (0.18) and indirect effects (0.32) via multiple pathways, was substantial (0.49 standardized regression weight). These results add to growing evidence on the important role of morphological awareness in reading comprehension and highlight the multiple ways that morphological awareness makes a contribution to reading comprehension in Chinese.
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