Enhancing Memory Access for Less Skilled Readers

Less skilled readers’ comprehension often suffers because they have an impoverished representation of text in long-term memory; this, in turn, increases the difficulty of gaining access to backgrounded information necessary for maintaining coherence. The results of four experiments demonstrated that providing less skilled readers with additional explicit interconnections enhanced their text representations in memory and increased their ability to maintain coherence. Experiments 1a and 1b confirmed the finding that less skilled readers were not disrupted by global inconsistencies. Experiments 2a and 2b showed that text manipulations designed to enhance the accessibility of global information led to less skilled readers being disrupted by global inconsistencies.     

An Analysis of the Word Naming Errors of Normal Readers and Reading Disabled Children in Spanish

In the current research the performance of children with and without reading disabilities was compared on a single word naming task. An analysis was carried out of the frequency and form of naming errors produced by the groups when naming real words and nonwords in a transparent orthography such as Spanish. A sample of 132 (45 normal readers, 87 reading disabled) Spanish children aged 9–10 years were selected, and an experiment was carried out to investigate if students with reading disabilities would have particular difficulties in naming words under conditions that require extensive phonological computation. While the children were performing the naming task, we recorded what they read to subsequently analyse the form, as well as the frequency, of naming errors as a function of lexicality, word frequency, word length and positional frequency of syllables. Disabled readers made more errors in nonwords, low frequency words and long nonwords. The findings support the hypothesis that poor phonological skills are a characteristic of reading disabled children.     

Effects of Consistency and Age of Acquisition on Reading and Spelling among Developing Readers

Three experiments investigated the effects of rime consistency on reading and spelling among developing readers ranging in age from 7 to 11 years. Experiment 1 found that children read words with inconsistent feedforward mappings between orthography and phonology (O → P) less accurately than consistent words. OP consistency interacted with chronological age, word frequency and age-of-acquisition (AoA). The effect of OP consistency on reading was larger for younger children than for older children and OP consistency had an effect for low frequency words and late-acquired words only. Experiment 2 found an effect of feedforward consistency between phonology and orthography (P → O) on children’s spelling but no interaction between PO consistency and AoA. Experiment 3 showed that the effects of feedforward consistency are independent of feedback consistency. Our results challenge models of reading and spelling that assume feedforward consistency effects are influenced by the frequency of exposure to words only and we suggest that interactions between consistency and AoA depends on the ratio of consistent to inconsistent OP mappings.     

Reading Difficulties in Adult Deaf Readers of French: Phonological Codes,Not Guilty!

Deaf people often achieve low levels of reading skills. The hypothesis that the use of phonological codes is associated with good reading skills in deaf readers is not yet fully supported in the literature. We investigated skilled and less skilled adult deaf readers' use of orthographic and phonological codes in reading. Experiment 1 used a masked priming paradigm to investigate automatic use of these codes during visual word processing. Experiment 2 used a serial recall task to determine whether orthographic and phonological codes are used to maintain words in memory. Skilled hearing, skilled deaf, and less skilled deaf readers used orthographic codes during word recognition and recall, but only skilled hearing readers relied on phonological codes during these tasks. It is important to note that skilled and less skilled deaf readers performed similarly in both tasks, indicating that reading difficulties in deaf adults may not be linked to the activation of phonological codes during reading.     

Use of Contextual Information and Prediction by Struggling Adult Readers: Evidence From Reading Times and Event-Related Potentials

We employed self-paced reading and event-related potential measures to investigate how adults of varying literacy levels use sentence context information when reading. Community-dwelling participants read strongly and weakly constraining sentences that ended with expected or unexpected target words. Skilled readers showed N400s that were graded by the cloze probability of the targets, with larger N400s for more unexpected words. Moreover, it took these participants longer to read unexpected targets in strongly than weakly constraining sentences, suggesting a processing cost for revising predictions. Among less skilled readers, a reliable N400 difference was found between expected and unexpected targets only for the strongly constraining sentences. They also took longer when targets were unexpected, regardless of the context. These findings suggest that lower literacy readers could only immediately take advantage of strongly constraining context information to facilitate word processing and that they do not make as much use of predictive processing during comprehension.     

论文学阅读的时代性

文学阅读是随着社会的变迁、生活的发展而变化,具有很强的时代性。文学阅读这种现象是由文学阅读的时代性所决定的。文学阅读的时代性主要表现为：文学作品内容的时代性;读者思想意识的时代性;文学审美风尚的时代性。     

The Need for Cross–Cultural Considerations in Reading Theory: The Effects of Arabic Sentence Context in Skilled and Poor Readers

This study was designed to investigate whether Arabic orthography differs from the Latin orthography of English texts regarding context effects among poor and normal readers. Usually, Arabic texts are presented without vowels for normal readers, and with vowels for younger and beginning readers. The Arabic vowels are mostly not alphabetic letters, but strokes above and/or below the letters. The subjects were 60 native Arab eighth graders, 20 poor readers and 40 normal readers of Arabic. Subjects were required to read vowelled and unvowelled words with and without context in Arabic. The results showed that normal as well as poor readers significantly improved their reading accuracy when they read vowelled and unvowelled words in context. Further, normal readers significantly improved their reading of vowelled and unvowelled words in context more than did the poor readers. The findings of this study illustrated the significance of cross-cultural linguistic considerations for the development of comprehensive reading theory.     

Building Reading Fluency in Developmental Readers

An increasing number of college students enrolling with poor reading fluency and comprehension skills pose a significant challenge to the college reading field in the absence of a strong understanding of the construct of reading fluency and its instruction. In order to contribute to this area of college reading, this article discusses instructional components that have been found to be effective in previous research in terms of their effectiveness and applicability for building fluent reading skills in struggling college readers.     

Augmenting the Simple View of Reading for Struggling Adult Readers: A Unique Role for Background Knowledge

This study explored the background knowledge (BK) and reading comprehension (RC) relationship for struggling adult readers. Using confirmatory factor analyses, a single-factor BK model exhibited better fit than a two-factor model separating academic knowledge and general information, which indicates that BK represents a unidimensional construct for this population. In addition, one measure of oral vocabulary loaded with a latent factor of BK, which was separable from a latent factor of two additional oral vocabulary subtests. Using structural equation modeling, we found that BK exhibited a direct effect on RC after controlling for participants’ grade level, decoding, listening comprehension, and oral vocabulary.     

Three-stages Reading Instruction that Develops Efficient Readers

This dissertation intends to show a theoretical framework and a practical teaching plan of how a three-stage reading instruction works for developing efficient readers in middle school reading classroom.     

The Relationship between Music and Reading in Beginning Readers

This study investigated the relationship of both phonemic and musical sound discrimination to reading ability in children in their first year at school. Awareness to changes in pitch and timbre of musical stimuli was assessed using a specially designed test of musical ability. Tests of phonemic awareness and of reading performance were also administered, with particular emphasis on ability at employing phonic skills in reading. The results support the hypothesis that discrimination of musical sounds is related to reading performance, but reveal that the influential factor in this relationship is a specific awareness of pitch changes.     

网络阅读环境下中国成年英语学习者的阅读策略

进入21世纪后随着网络技术的迅速发展、互联网应用的逐渐普及,以及教师运用网络技术能力的普遍提高,来自互联网的电子文本开始被语言教学者用于课堂教学,网络探究阅读近年来被广泛尝试.由于网络文本与传统的印刷文本相比具有非线性、多维性和交互性等特点,网络探究阅读活动在阅读目的、阅读过程和阅读结果方面与传统阅读活动也就产生了很大的差异.本研究使用一个开放式的问卷,目的是探索中国成年英语学习者在网络探究阅读过程中的阅读方式和所使用的阅读策略.研究结果显示,中国成年英语学习者在网络探究阅读环境下的阅读过程仍然和阅读传统印刷文本相似,大部分学生沿袭了传统的线性阅读模式;他们不善使用归纳概括策略,不善利用图片等多媒体辅助手段促进理解,但是区分重要和次要链接的能力较强;多数学生喜欢多媒体网络文本.上述发现为以网络为基础的英语阅读教学和阅读策略教学和训练提供了有益的启示.     

大学生阅读现状与图书馆导读方法

针对高校大学生阅读的状况和存在的问题,以及图书馆文献资源不能充分利用的现象,阐述了导读工作的重要意义,提出了图书馆应该建设高素质的馆员导读队伍、把好书籍质量关、加强新生入馆教育、建立网上导读系统以及多开展图书导读活动等建议。     

Neural Systems for Rapid Automatized Naming in Skilled Readers: Unraveling the RAN-Reading Relationship

The majority of children and adults with reading disabilities exhibit pronounced difficulties on naming-speed measures such as tests of rapid automatized naming (RAN). RAN tasks require speeded naming of serially presented stimuli and share key characteristics with reading, but different versions of the RAN task vary in their sensitivity: The RAN letters task successfully predicts reading ability, whereas the RAN objects task does not reliably predict reading after kindergarten. In this study we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to evaluate the neural substrates that may underlie performance on these tasks. In two scans during the same test session, adult, average readers covertly rapidly named objects or letters or passively viewed a fixation matrix of plus signs. For both rapid naming tasks compared with fixation, activation was found in neural areas associated with eye movement control and attention as well as in a network of structures previously implicated in reading tasks. This reading network included inferior frontal cortex, temporo-parietal areas, and the ventral visual stream. Whereas the inferior frontal areas of the network were similarly activated for both letters and objects, activation in the posterior areas varied by task. The letters task caused greater activation in the angular gyrus, superior parietal lobule, and medial extrastriate areas, whereas object naming only preferentially activated an area of the fusiform gyrus. These results confirm that RAN tasks recruit a network of neural structures also involved in more complex reading tasks and suggest that the RAN letters task specifically pinpoints key components of this network.     

A Study of Laterality Characteristics of Retarded Readers and Reading Achievers

Two field observation studies conducted with American and Chinese students, aged 8 to 11, were used to examine developmental and cultural patterns in academic risk-taking (i.e., student selection of academic achievement tasks varying in difficulty) and to formulate hypotheses pertinent to this phenomenon. Data led to the following tentative conclusions: (a) Sex differences in academic risk-taking and failure tolerance are trivial. (b) Failure tolerance decreases with development. (c) Academic risk-taking is low relative to the theoretically optimum risk level of .50. (d) Developmental patterns in academic risk-taking vary with situational factors. (e) Academic risk-taking varies with content. (f) Academic risk-taking tends to be higher for American students than for Chinese students and higher for Chinese students from industrial settings in contrast to government-employment settings. Three hypotheses were formulated to explain the field observations: the variable payoff hypothesis, the accuracy-difficulty judgment hypothesis, and the external constraint hypothesis.