Developing a structural model of reading: the role of hearing status in reading development over time

Vocabulario profundo y lectura en el alumnado con sordera. Una revisión sistemática

Diferentes estudios en el ámbito de la comprensión lectora señalan que el vocabulario oral de una lengua, definido por dos variables, amplitud y profundidad, es uno de los factores que más contribuye a esta destreza en lectores típicos; siendo la profundidad, relacionada con la extensión de las representaciones semánticas subyacentes a los conceptos, más influyente que la amplitud, referida a la cantidad de palabras que una persona es capaz de reconocer. Estudios previos muestran las dificultades que el alumnado con sordera presenta en la realización de asociaciones entre palabras, en el establecimiento de relaciones entre significados o en el uso de sinónimos; todas ellas derivadas, principalmente, del déficit lingüístico primario que presentan. El objetivo de este estudio ha sido doble: por un lado, analizar los resultados de aquellas investigaciones que evalúan el rol del vocabulario profundo en la comprensión lectora del alumnado con sordera y, por otro lado, argumentar qué influencia tiene dicha profundidad en esta destreza. Se realizó una búsqueda bibliográfica en las principales bases de datos (2010 – 2021). En la búsqueda inicial se identificaron 373 artículos y, una vez aplicados los criterios de inclusión, 8 fueron los que cumplieron con los objetivos previamente definidos. Los resultados mostraron que el reconocimiento del vocabulario profundo en las investigaciones relacionadas con el desarrollo lector del alumnado con sordera podría desembocar en una mejor comprensión de su papel en las habilidades implicadas en dicho proceso. Por ello, es necesario ahondar teóricamente en su tratamiento y en sus implicaciones para la práctica educativa con estudiantes con sordera.

Adolescents' Developing Sensitivity to Orthographic and Semantic Cues During Visual Search for Words

Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted to assess the influence of words either looking like the target word (orthographic distractors) or semantically related to the target word (semantic distractors) on visual search for words within lists by adolescents of 11, 13, and 15 years of age. In Experiment 1 (literal search task), participants saw the target word before the search (e.g., "raven"), whereas in Experiment 2 (categorical task) the target word was only defined by its semantic category (e.g., "bird"). In both experiments, participants' search times decreased from fifth to ninth grade, both because older adolescents gazed less often at non-target words during the search and because they could reject non-target words more quickly once they were fixated. Progress in visual search efficiency was associated with a large increase in word identification skills, which were a strong determinant of average gaze durations and search times for the categorical task, but much less for the literal task. In the literal task, the presence of orthographic or semantic distractors in the list increased search times for all age groups. In the categorical task, the impact of semantic distractor words was stronger than in the literal task because participants needed to gaze at the semantic distractors longer than at the other words before rejecting them. Altogether, the data support the assumption that the progressive automation of word decoding up until the age of 12 and the better quality of older adolescents' lexical representations facilitate a flexible use of both the perceptual and semantic features of words for top-down guidance within the displays. In particular, older adolescents were better prepared to aim at or reject words without gazing at them directly. Finally, the overall similar progression of the maturation of single word visual search processes and that of more real-life information search within complex verbal documents suggests that the young adolescents' difficulties in searching the Web effectively could be due to their insufficiently developed lexical representations and word decoding abilities.

Reading Function and Content Words in Subtitled Videos

In this study, we examined how function and content words are read in intra- and interlingual subtitles. We monitored eye movements of a group of 39 deaf, 27 hard of hearing, and 56 hearing Polish participants while they viewed English and Polish videos with Polish subtitles. We found that function words and short content words received less visual attention than longer content words, which was reflected in shorter dwell time, lower number of fixations, shorter first fixation duration, and lower subject hit count. Deaf participants dwelled significantly longer on function words than other participants, which may be an indication of their difficulty in processing this type of words. The findings are discussed in the context of classical reading research and applied research on subtitling.