Everyday speech is rife with errors and disfluencies, yet processing what we hear usually feels effortless. How does the language comprehension system accomplish such an impressive feat? The current ...experiment tests the hypothesis that listeners draw on relevant contextual and linguistic cues to anticipate speech errors and mentally correct them, even before receiving an explicit correction from the speaker. In the current visual-world eye-tracking experiment, we monitored participants' eye movements to objects in a display while they listened to utterances containing reparandum-repair speech errors (e.g., . . . his cat, uh I mean his dog . . .). The contextual plausibility of the misspoken word and the certainty with which the speaker uttered this word were systematically manipulated. Results showed that listeners immediately exploited these cues to generate top-down expectations regarding the speaker's communicative intention. Crucially, listeners used these expectations to constrain the bottom-up speech input and mentally correct perceived speech errors, even before the speaker initiated the correction. The results provide powerful evidence regarding the joint process of correcting speech errors that involves both the speaker and the listener.
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CEKLJ, FFLJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PEFLJ, UPUK
Background
Word reading and linguistic comprehension skills are two crucial components in reading comprehension, according to the Simple View of Reading (SVR). Some researchers have posited that a ...third component should be involved in reading and understanding texts, namely executive function (EF) skills.
Aim
This study was novel in two ways. Not only did we tested EF skills as a predictor of reading comprehension in a non‐alphabetic language (i.e., Chinese) to extend the theoretical model of SVR, we also examined reading comprehension further in kindergarten children (age 5) in Hong Kong, in the attempt to reveal possible early precursors of reading comprehension.
Sample(s)
A group of 170 K3 kindergarteners was recruited in Hong Kong.
Methods
Children's word reading was assessed. Their linguistic comprehension was assessed with phonological awareness, verbal short‐term memory, and vocabulary knowledge. Using a structured observation task, Head‐Toes‐Knees‐Shoulders (HTKS), we measured their composite scores for EF skills.
Results
Head‐Toes‐Knees‐Shoulders performance predicted unique variance in children's Chinese reading comprehension concurrently beyond word reading and a set of linguistic comprehension skills.
Conclusions
The results highlight the important role of EF skills in beginning readers’ reading comprehension.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, FZAB, GIS, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Research shows that misconceptions are usually detrimental to text comprehension. However, whether misconceptions also impair metacomprehension accuracy, that is, the accuracy with which one ...self-assesses one's text comprehension, has received far less attention. We conducted a study in which we examined students' (N = 47) comprehension and metacomprehension accuracy (prediction accuracy and postdiction accuracy) of a statistics text as a function of their statistical misconceptions. Text comprehension and metacomprehension accuracy referred to both conceptual and procedural aspects of statistics. The results showed that students who had more misconceptions achieved poorer conceptual text comprehension and, at the same time, provided more overconfident predictions of their conceptual and procedural text comprehension than students who had fewer misconceptions. In contrast, postdiction accuracy of conceptual and procedural text comprehension was not affected by misconceptions.
The effect of humor on insight problem-solving Zhou, Zhijin; Wu, Jieqing; Luo, Hualin ...
Personality and individual differences,
December 2021, 2021-12-00, 20211201, Volume:
183
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Past literature on humor and creativity mainly focuses on the positive effect of humor on the divergent aspect of creativity. However, few researches have examined the relationship between humor and ...the convergent aspect of creativity, specifically insight problem-solving. The present research aimed to fill in this gap and examine the effect of humor on insight problem-solving. In Study 1, a sample of 32 subjects participated in a within-subjects study that tested the effects of humor comprehension (cognitive component of humor) and humor appreciation (affective component of humor) on insight problem-solving. In Study 2, a sample of 62 participants was recruited in a between-subjects study that examined the mediating role of cognitive flexibility. The results showed that: (1) participants' performance on insight problem-solving was significantly higher in humor condition than that in the non-humor condition; (2) no performance differences were found between the cognitive humor condition and the cognitive and affective humor condition; (3) cognitive flexibility partially mediated the effect of humor on insight problem-solving. These findings suggested that humor comprehension, rather than humor appreciation, can promote individuals' performance on insight problem-solving. The implications for convergent aspect of creativity and interventions on how to utilize humor to enhance creativity are discussed.
•The cognitive component of humor bolsters the insight problem-solving.•The affective component of humor doesn't promote the insight problem-solving.•Cognitive flexibility mediated the effect of humor on insight problem-solving.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Background
Research on prior knowledge activation has consistently shown that activating learners' prior knowledge has beneficial effects on learning. If learners activate their prior knowledge, this ...activated knowledge serves as a framework for establishing relationships between the knowledge they already possess and new information provided to them. Thus far, prior knowledge activation has dealt primarily with topic knowledge in specific domains. Students, however, likely also possess at least some metacognitive knowledge useful in those domains, which, when activated, should aid in the deployment of helpful strategies during reading.
Aims
In this study, we investigated the effects of both prior topic knowledge activation (PTKA) and prior metacognitive knowledge activation (PMKA) on text comprehension scores.
Samples & Methods
Eighty‐eight students in primary education were randomly distributed amongst the conditions of the 2 × 2 (PTKA yes/no × PMKA yes/no) designed experiment.
Results
Results show that activating prior metacognitive knowledge had a beneficial effect on text comprehension, whereas activating prior topic knowledge, after correcting for the amount of prior knowledge, did not.
Conclusions
Most studies deal with explicit instruction of metacognitive knowledge, but our results show that this may not be necessary, specifically in the case of students who already have some metacognitive knowledge. However, existing metacognitive knowledge needs to be activated in order for students to make better use of this knowledge.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, FZAB, GIS, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
► We report two eye-tracking studies on expectations & locality in German verb processing. ► We eliminate confounds in expectation-based facilitation from preverbal dependents. ► We find new evidence ...of locality effects when memory load is high. ► These results constrain theories of expectations & memory in sentence comprehension.
Probabilistic expectations and memory limitations are central factors governing the real-time comprehension of natural language, but how the two factors interact remains poorly understood. One respect in which the two factors have come into theoretical conflict is the documentation of both locality effects, in which having more dependents preceding a governing verb increases processing difficulty at the verb, and anti-locality effects, in which having more preceding dependents facilitates processing at the verb. However, no controlled study has previously demonstrated both locality and anti-locality effects in the same type of dependency relation within the same language. Additionally, many previous demonstrations of anti-locality effects have been potentially confounded with lexical identity, plausibility, and sentence position. Here, we provide new evidence of both locality and anti-locality effects in the same type of dependency relation in a single language—verb-final constructions in German—while controlling for lexical identity, plausibility, and sentence position. In main clauses, we find clear anti-locality effects, with the presence of a preceding dative argument facilitating processing at the final verb; in subject-extracted relative clauses with identical linear ordering of verbal dependents, we find both anti-locality and locality effects, with processing facilitated when the verb is preceded by a dative argument alone, but hindered when the verb is preceded by both the dative argument and an adjunct. These results indicate that both expectations and memory limitations need to be accounted for in any complete theory of online syntactic comprehension.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK
Purpose Every adult with aphasia displays a unique constellation of language comprehension skills and varies in the benefit derived from different content presentation formats. For many, multiple ...modality presentation enhances comprehension. This study's purpose was to determine the comprehension benefits for people with mild, moderate, and severe aphasia when hearing, reading, or simultaneously hearing and reading single sentences. Method Twenty-seven adults with aphasia performed a repeated-measures experiment across 3 conditions. Participants read and/or listened to sentence stimuli and selected from 4 images the 1 matching the sentence. Participants also indicated condition preference. Results Participants demonstrated significantly greatest accuracy during simultaneous written and auditory stimulus presentation. Performance patterns varied within aphasia severity groups. Individuals with mild and moderate aphasia demonstrated minimal performance differences across conditions, and people with severe aphasia were significantly more accurate in the combined modality than the written-only modality. Overall, participants required the longest response time in the written-only condition; however, participants were most efficient with auditory content. Condition preferences did not always mirror accuracy; however, the majority reported a preference for combined content presentation. Conclusions Results suggest some people with aphasia may benefit from combined auditory and written modalities to enhance comprehension efforts.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VSZLJ
Mind wandering is a phenomenon in which attention drifts away from the primary task to task-unrelated thoughts. Previous studies have used self-report methods to measure the frequency of mind ...wandering and its effects on task performance. Many of these studies have investigated mind wandering in simple perceptual and memory tasks, such as recognition memory, sustained attention, and choice reaction time tasks. Manipulations of task difficulty have revealed that mind wandering occurs more frequently in easy than in difficult conditions, but that it has a greater negative impact on performance in the difficult conditions. The goal of this study was to examine the relation between mind wandering and task difficulty in a high-level cognitive task, namely reading comprehension of standardized texts. We hypothesized that reading comprehension may yield a different relation between mind wandering and task difficulty than has been observed previously. Participants read easy or difficult versions of eight passages and then answered comprehension questions after reading each of the passages. Mind wandering was reported using the probe-caught method from several previous studies. In contrast to the previous results, but consistent with our hypothesis, mind wandering occurred more frequently when participants read difficult rather than easy texts. However, mind wandering had a more negative influence on comprehension for the difficult texts, which is consistent with the previous data. The results are interpreted from the perspectives of the executive-resources and control-failure theories of mind wandering, as well as with regard to situation models of text comprehension.
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EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
•Grammatical oral understanding explained 41% of the variance in text comprehension.•Understanding of reversible, predicate and disjunctive sentences correlated with text comprehension.•Reversible ...sentences (passive and predicative) accounted for 38% of the variance.
The aim of this study was to analyze how the reading process of deaf Spanish elementary school students is affected both by those components that explain reading comprehension according to the Simple View of Reading model: decoding and linguistic comprehension (both lexical and grammatical) and by other variables that are external to the reading process: the type of assistive technology used, the age at which it is implanted or fitted, the participant’s socioeconomic status and school stage.
Forty-seven students aged between 6 and 13 years participated in the study; all presented with profound or severe prelingual bilateral deafness, and all used digital hearing aids or cochlear implants. Students’ text comprehension skills, decoding skills and oral comprehension skills (both lexical and grammatical) were evaluated.
Logistic regression analysis indicated that neither the type of assistive technology, age at time of fitting or activation, socioeconomic status, nor school stage could predict the presence or absence of difficulties in text comprehension. Furthermore, logistic regression analysis indicated that neither decoding skills, nor lexical age could predict competency in text comprehension; however, grammatical age could explain 41% of the variance. Probing deeper into the effect of grammatical understanding, logistic regression analysis indicated that a participant’s understanding of reversible passive object-verb-subject sentences and reversible predicative subject-verb-object sentences accounted for 38% of the variance in text comprehension.
Based on these results, we suggest that it might be beneficial to devise and evaluate interventions that focus specifically on grammatical comprehension.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZRSKP
This study synthesized the correlation between reading strategy and reading comprehension of four categories based on Weinstein and Mayer's reading strategy model. The current meta-analysis obtained ...57 effect sizes that represented 21,548 readers, and all selected materials came from empirical studies published from 1998 to 2019. Results showed that reading strategies in all the four categories had a similar correlation effect size with reading comprehension. The correlation between monitoring strategy and reading comprehension was significantly larger in first language scripts than second language scripts. Affective strategy and elaboration strategy had an independent effect on reading comprehension, which was not significantly moderated by selected moderators. Results suggested that the reading strategies of all the four categories may have a similar contribution to text comprehension activities.
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