Current models of morphological processing differ in their assumptions about the recognition of compound words. The relative contribution of the first and second constituent and the whole-word ...remains unsolved. Particularly for beginning readers, the first constituent might have a privileged role attributable to more sequential decoding strategies. In a series of lexical decision experiments, the influence of constituent and whole-word frequencies on compound recognition was examined in German developing readers as well as adults. Results showed that whole-word and first constituent frequency interactively influenced response times in children. For adults, an effect of whole-word frequency only was obtained for the children's stimuli set, and noninteracting effects of whole-word frequency and first constituent frequency were found when using adult frequency measures. Together, the results suggest that developing readers already decompose compounds and that hybrid interactive models of morphological processing are most suitable to explain compound recognition across development. The applicability of amorphous models is also discussed.
Reading comprehension is the product of constructing a coherent mental model of a text. Although some of the processes that are necessary to construct such a mental model are executed incrementally, ...others are deferred to the end of the clause or sentence, where integration processing is wrapped up before the reader progresses further in the text. In this longitudinal study of 65 German-speaking children across Grades 2, 3, and 4, we investigated the development of wrap-up processes at clause and sentence boundaries by tracking the children's eye movements while they read age-appropriate texts. Our central finding was that children in Grade 2 showed strong wrap-up effects that then slowly decreased across school grades. Children in Grades 3 and 4 also increasingly used clause and sentence boundaries to initiate regressions and rereading. Finally, children in Grade 2 were shown to be significantly disrupted in their reading at line breaks, which are inherent in continuous text. This disruption decreased as the children progressed to Grades 3 and 4. Overall, our results show that children exhibit an adultlike pattern of wrap-up effects by the time they reach Grade 4. We discuss this developmental trajectory in relation to models of text processing and mechanisms of eye-movement control.
You Don't Have to Believe Everything You Read Richter, Tobias; Schroeder, Sascha; Wöhrmann, Britta
Journal of personality and social psychology,
03/2009, Letnik:
96, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In social cognition, knowledge-based validation of information is usually regarded as relying on strategic and resource-demanding processes. Research on language comprehension, in contrast, suggests ...that validation processes are involved in the construction of a referential representation of the communicated information. This view implies that individuals can use their knowledge to validate incoming information in a routine and efficient manner. Consistent with this idea, Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that individuals are able to reject false assertions efficiently when they have validity-relevant beliefs. Validation processes were carried out routinely even when individuals were put under additional cognitive load during comprehension. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the rejection of false information occurs automatically and interferes with affirmative responses in a nonsemantic task (epistemic Stroop effect). Experiment 4 also revealed complementary interference effects of true information with negative responses in a nonsemantic task. These results suggest the existence of fast and efficient validation processes that protect mental representations from being contaminated by false and inaccurate information.
Words are seldom read in isolation. Predicting or anticipating upcoming words in a text, based on the context in which they are read, is an important aspect of efficient language processing. In ...sentence reading, words with congruent preceding context have been shown to be processed faster than words read in neutral or incongruous contexts. The onset of contextual facilitation effects is found very early in the first-pass-reading eye-movement and electroencephalogram (EEG) measures of skilled adult readers. However, the effect of contextual facilitation on children's eye movements during reading remains largely unexplored. To fill this gap, we tracked children's and adults' eye movements while reading stories with embedded words that were either strongly or weakly related to a clear narrative theme. Our central finding is that children showed late contextual facilitation effects during text reading as opposed to both early and late facilitation effects found in skilled adult readers. Contextual constraint had a similar effect on children's and adults' initiation of regressive saccades, whereas children invested more time in rereading relative to adults after encountering weakly contextually constrained words. Quantile regression analyses revealed that contextual facilitation effects had an early onset in adults' first-pass reading, whereas they only had a late onset in children's gaze durations.
Vocabulary knowledge is one of the most important elements of reading comprehension. Text coverage is the proportion of known words in a given text. We hypothesize that text comprehension increases ...exponentially with text coverage due to network effects and activation of prior knowledge. In addition, the lexical threshold hypothesis states that text comprehension increases faster above a certain amount of text coverage. The exponential relationship between text coverage and text comprehension, as well as the lexical threshold, are at the heart of text comprehension theory and are of great interest for optimizing language instruction. In this study, we first used vocabulary knowledge to estimate text coverage based on test scores from
N
= 924 German fourth graders. Second, we compared linear with non-linear models of text coverage and vocabulary knowledge to explain text comprehension. Third, we used a broken-line regression to estimate a lexical threshold. The results showed an exponential relationship between text coverage and text comprehension. Moreover, text coverage explained text comprehension better than vocabulary knowledge, and text comprehension increased more quickly above 56% text coverage. From an instructional perspective, the results suggest that reading activities with text coverage below 56% are too difficult for readers and likely inappropriate for instructional purposes. Further applications of the results, such as for standard setting and readability analyses, are discussed.
Investigating the impact of linguistic characteristics on visual word recognition in children, we studied whether differences in native (L1) and second language (L2) processing already emerge at the ...beginning of reading development. German elementary school students in grades 2 to 6 completed a battery of standardized tests and a lexical decision task (LDT). Though L1 speakers outperformed L2 speakers on German skills, groups did not differ in their overall performance on the LDT. However, results from mixed-effect models revealed greater effects for word frequency and length in L2 over L1 speakers, indicating qualitative differences in the sensitivity to linguistic information between groups. This distinction persisted across all grades and after controlling for differences in vocabulary size and reading fluency. Findings extend evidence provided for adult L2 processing, suggesting that varying language exposure shapes the development of the word-recognition system already in the early stages of reading development.
This article introduces childLex, an online database of German read by children. childLex is based on a corpus of children’s books and comprises 10 million words that were syntactically annotated and ...lemmatized. childLex reports linguistic norms for lexical, superlexical, and sublexical variables in three different age groups: 6–8 (grades 1–2), 9–10 (grades 3–4), and 11–12 years (grades 5–6). Here, we describe how childLex was collected and analyzed. In addition, we provide information about the distributions of word frequency, word length, and orthographic neighborhood size, as well as their intercorrelations. Finally, we explain how childLex can be accessed using a Web interface.
Successful reading comprehension—especially in a second language (L2)—relies on the ability to monitor one’s comprehension, that is, to notice comprehension breaks and make repairs. Comprehension ...monitoring may be limited given effortful word processing but may also be supported through active reading. The current study addresses to what extent word processing difficulty reduces adolescents’ ability to monitor their comprehension in their L2, and whether readers can compensate limitations given sufficient executive control. We conducted an eye-tracking experiment in which 34 adolescent L2 learners (aged 13–17 years) read short expository texts containing two within-subject manipulations. First, comprehension monitoring was tested through inconsistencies, for example, when the topic changed from
Spanish
to
Russian
vis-à-vis consistent controls. Second, word processing difficulty was altered by inserting either shorter and higher-frequency words such as
want
, or longer and lower-frequency words such as
prefer
. We additionally measured participants’ executive control. Outcome variables were reading times on the whole texts and the words manipulated for inconsistency and word processing difficulty. We found evidence of successful moment-to-moment monitoring, as visible in adolescents’ increased rereading of inconsistent compared to consistent information. We also found that adolescents adapted their monitoring differently to word processing difficulty, depending on their executive control: while adolescents with weaker control reduced their monitoring given higher word processing difficulty, adolescents with stronger control monitored their comprehension more (instead of less) on difficult texts. These findings provide insights into how L2 comprehension monitoring arises in the interplay of lower-level processing load and active reading processes.
The present study investigated the development and training of music competencies in children in transition from kindergarten to school. In an intervention study with three experimental groups (music ...training, language training, no training) we investigated music performances of N = 202 5-year-old children before and after a period of 6 months. Results indicate substantial improvement in several low- and high-level musical competencies independent of children’s participation in one of the training groups. In addition, the music training group improved significantly more in their tonal discrimination, rhythm repetition, and synchronization skills compared to the no-training group. Results show that children in the language training group also improved in their music skills, which indicates noticeable overlap between these two domains. By contrast, interindividual differences in potentially relevant environmental factors, such as home musical environment and their socioeconomic status, did not affect children’s musical skills. By disentangling music training effects from musical experience based on informal exposure, the present findings contribute to the understanding of the development of various music competencies and to the effects of musical trainings in preschool.
The developmental trajectory of the use of morphemes is still unclear. We investigated the emergence of morphological effects on visual word recognition in German in a large sample across the ...complete course of reading acquisition in elementary school. To this end, we analyzed lexical decision data on a total of 1,152 words and pseudowords from a large cross-sectional sample of German children from the beginning of Grade 2 through 6, and a group of adults. We expand earlier evidence by (a) explicitly investigating processing differences between compounds, prefixes and suffixes, (b) taking into account vocabulary knowledge as an indicator for interindividual differences. Results imply that readers of German are sensitive to morphology in very early stages of reading acquisition with trajectories depending on morphological type and vocabulary knowledge. Facilitation from compound structure comes early in development, followed by facilitation from suffixes and prefixes later on in development. This indicates that stems and different types of affixes involve distinct processing mechanisms in beginning readers. Furthermore, children with higher vocabulary knowledge benefit earlier in development and to a greater extent from morphology. Our results specify the development and functional role of morphemes as reading units.
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