Eye Movements, Prosody, and Word Frequency Among Average- and High- Skilled Second-Grade Readers

The effects of question previewing on response accuracy and text processing: An eye-movement study

The present study investigated the impact of manipulating reading strategies (i.e., reading the questions first [QF] or reading the passage first [PF]) during a reading comprehension test where we explored how reading strategy was related to student characteristics (i.e., reading achievement and working memory capacity). Participants' eye movements were monitored as they read 12 passages and answered multiple-choice questions. We examined differences in (a) response accuracy, (b) average total time on words in the text, (c) total task reading time, and (d) time reading text relevant to questions as a function of PF and QF strategies. Analyses were conducted to examine whether findings varied as a function of student characteristics (i.e., reading achievement and working memory capacity) and grade level (Grades 3, 5, and 8). Several interesting findings emerged from our study, including a limited effect of reading strategy use on response accuracy, with only eighth graders demonstrating better accuracy in the QF condition, and several demonstrations of PF leading to more efficient test-taking processes, including (a) longer average total reading times on words in the passage in the PF condition that could be associated with creating a better mental model of the text, (b) often being associated with less total-task time, and (c) being associated with more successful search strategies. Implications for providing teachers and students with strategies are discussed.

Segmented relations between online reading behaviors, text properties, and reader-text interactions: An eye-movement experiment

Purpose

To investigate relations between abilities of readers and properties of words during online sentence reading, we conducted a sentence reading eye-movements study on young adults of English monolinguals from the US, who exhibited a wide scope of individual differences in standard measures of language and literacy skills.

Method

We adopted mixed-effects regression models of gaze measures of early and late print processing stages from sentence onset to investigate possible associations between gaze measures, text properties, and skill measures. We also applied segmented linear regressions to detect the dynamics of identified associations.

Results

Our study reported significant associations between (a) gaze measures (first-pass reading time, total reading times, and first-pass regression probability) and (b) interactions of lexical properties (word length or position) and skill measures (vocabulary, oral reading fluency, decoding, and verbal working memory), and confirmed a segmented linear dynamics between gaze measures and lexical properties, which was influenced by skill measures.

Conclusion

This study extends the previous work on predictive effects of individual language and literacy skills on online reading behavior, enriches the existing methodology exploring the dynamics of associations between lexical properties and eye-movement measures, and stimulates future work investigating factors that shape such dynamics.

Spanish L2 Chinese Learners' Awareness of Morpho-Syntactic Structures in the Reading Comprehension of Splittable Compounds

Reading comprehension is never considered a simple task in linguists' views as it requires a full set of linguistic knowledge, such as word decoding, understanding syntactic and morphological structures, and deriving proper meanings from these structures in a given context. Bearing the simple view of reading, the primary goal of this study is to explore whether the split presentation of Chinese splittable compounds influences the recognition of the compounds in second language (L2) Chinese reading comprehension, and how the reading skills, i.e., word decoding and linguistic comprehension, cooperate to complete this reading comprehension task. Splittable compounds (SCs) in Chinese are typically verbs composed of two constituents with limited separability. The separable property of SCs and their vague morpho-syntactic status are supposed to cause difficulties for L2 Chinese learners in recognizing the compounds. Especially for those whose native language manifests lexical integrity, the split presentation of the compounds may invite the L2 Chinese readers to process them with a mechanism different from that for their non-split forms. To the best of our knowledge, the efforts on investigating this issue are insufficient. In this study, 27 Spanish speaking L2 Chinese learners were invited to complete tasks including reading and interpreting 6 selected SCs in the split and non-split forms, rating their familiarities with each SC and reporting the syntactic category of the SCs based on their existing linguistic knowledge. The results, showed that the split presentation of SCs did cause challenges for L2 Chinese learners in recognizing the compounds in the reading process, regardless of their Chinese proficiencies. The L2 Chinese participants performed significantly worse in recognizing split SCs in salient Verb-Object structures than recognizing those in unsalient Verb-Object structures. These findings underscore the importance of linguistic comprehension in L2 Chinese in-text word reading comprehension and suggest words as the basic processing units.

Prosody Improves Detection of Spoonerisms Versus Both Sensible and Nonsense Phrases

Prosody is the pattern of inflection, pitch, and intensity that communicates emotional meaning above and beyond the individual meanings of lexical items and gestures during spoken language. Research has often addressed prosody extending most clearly across multiple speech chunks and carrying properties specific to individual speakers and individual intents. However, prosody exerts effects on intended meaning even for relatively brief speech streams with minimal syntactic cues. The present work seeks to test whether prosody may actually clarify the intended meaning of a two-word phrase even when the basic phonemic sequence of the words is distorted. Thirty-eight undergraduate participants attempted to correctly categorize auditorily presented two-word phrases as belonging to one of three categories: nonsensical phrases; sensible phrases; and spoonerisms. Mixed Poisson modeling of cumulative accuracy found a significant positive interaction of prosody with phrase type indicating that conversational prosody made participants 8.27% more likely to accurately detect spoonerisms. Prosody makes spoken-language comprehension of two-word phrases more robust to distortions of phonemic sequence.

Effects of Word Frequency and Transitional Probability on Word Reading Durations of Younger and Older Speakers

High-frequency units are usually processed faster than low-frequency units in language comprehension and language production. Frequency effects have been shown for words as well as word combinations. Word co-occurrence effects can be operationalized in terms of transitional probability (TP). TPs reflect how probable a word is, conditioned by its right or left neighbouring word. This corpus study investigates whether three different age groups-younger children (8-12 years), adolescents (12-18 years) and older (62-95 years) Dutch speakers-show frequency and TP context effects on spoken word durations in reading aloud, and whether age groups differ in the size of these effects. Results show consistent effects of TP on word durations for all age groups. Thus, TP seems to influence the processing of words in context, beyond the well-established effect of word frequency, across the entire age range. However, the study also indicates that age groups differ in the size of TP effects, with older adults having smaller TP effects than adolescent readers. Our results show that probabilistic reduction effects in reading aloud may at least partly stem from contextual facilitation that leads to faster reading times in skilled readers, as well as in young language learners.

Repeated versus wide reading: A randomized control design study examining the impact of fluency interventions on underlying reading behavior

Repeated readings (RR) has garnered much attention as an evidence based intervention designed to improve all components of reading fluency (rate, accuracy, prosody, and comprehension). Despite this attention, there is not an abundance of research comparing its effectiveness to other potential interventions. The current study presents the findings from a randomized control trial study involving the assignment of 168second grade students to a RR, wide reading (WR), or business as usual condition. Intervention students were provided with 9-10weeks of intervention with sessions occurring four times per week. Pre- and post-testing were conducted using Woodcock-Johnson III reading achievement measures (Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather, 2001, curriculum-based measurement (CBM) probes, measures of prosody, and measures of students' eye movements when reading. Changes in fluency were also monitored using weekly CBM progress monitoring procedures. Data were collected on the amount of time students spent reading and the number of words read by students during each intervention session. Results indicate substantial gains made by students across conditions, with some measures indicating greater gains by students in the two intervention conditions. Analyses do not indicate that RR was superior to WR. In addition to expanding the RR literature, this study greatly expands research evaluating changes in reading behaviors that occur with improvements in reading fluency. Implications regarding whether schools should provide more opportunities to repeatedly practice the same text (i.e., RR) or practice a wide range of text (i.e., WR) are provided.

Developmental Changes in Eye Movements and Visual Information Encoding Associated With Learning to Read

A great deal of eye-movement research has resulted in sophisticated computational models of skilled adult reading. As yet, insufficient eye-movement research has been conducted with children to allow a more thorough understanding of the developmental trajectory leading up to this end state. I argue that, in order to fully understand how children progress to skilled adult reading, it is necessary to consider changes in both cognitive processing and eye-movement behavior. By recording children’s eye movements during reading, researchers can document how printed text is encoded and incrementally delivered for subsequent cognitive processing, and understand how developmental changes in these two aspects of reading are interdependent.