Good Decoding Research Articles

Listening comprehension and reading comprehension in poor decoders: Evidence for the importance of syntactic and semantic skills as well as phonological skills

The relation between decoding and comprehensionin the oral and written modalities was studiedin a randomly selected group of nine-year-olds,subdivided into good, average and poordecoders. Performances on two types ofcomprehension tasks (story retelling andcloze tasks) were compared and related tophonological, syntactic and semantic abilities.(Story retelling demanded the ability to retellthe gist of a story, while the cloze tasksdemanded precise skills in drawing anaphoricreference across sentence boundaries.) Atwo-way analysis of variance using IQ ascovariate showed that poor decoders scoredlower than average and good decoders on allcomprehension tasks. This suggests a highdegree of interdependence between listeningcomprehension, reading comprehension anddecoding. The associated pattern of oralcorrelates furthermore varied with task demandsand to some extent, independent of modality.Vocabulary was related to the ability toretell a story. Syntax and, in particularphonemic awareness, were on the otherhand more strongly related to the ability todraw anaphoric reference. The results wereinterpreted in favor of ``the phonologicaldeficit hypothesis'', but the interactionbetween linguistic sub-skills and task demandswas also underscored.

A note on tailbiting codes and their feedback encoders

Tailbiting codes encoded by feedback convolutional encoders are studied. A condition for when tailbiting will work is given and it is described how the encoder starting state can be obtained for feedback encoders in both controller and observer canonical forms. Finally, results from a search for systematic feedback encoders that encode tailbiting codes with good decoding bit error probabilities are presented.

Generalized time sharing: a low-complexity capacity-achieving multiple-access technique

It is shown that the encoding/decoding problem for any asynchronous M-user memoryless multiple-access channel (MAC) can be reduced to corresponding problems for at most 2M-1 single-user memoryless channels. This is done via a method called generalized time sharing that is closely related to a previously developed method called rate-splitting multiple access. These methods reduce the seemingly hard task of finding good multiple-access codes and implementable decoders for such codes to the much better understood task of finding codes and decoders for single-user channels. As a by-product, some interesting properties of the capacity region of M-user asynchronous discrete memoryless channels are derived.

Poor Reading Comprehension Despite Fast Word Decoding in Children with Hydrocephalus

Children with hydrocephalus decode words better than they understand what they read. We tested whether children with hydrocephalus (from myelomeningocele or aqueduct stenosis) (1) decode words slowly, (2) use decoding processes similar to those of neurologically intact peers, and (3) comprehend poorly to the extent that they are slow decoders. We compared speed of word decoding in 33 children with hydrocephalus and 33 controls matched on a pairwise basis for age, grade, and word decoding accuracy. The children with hydrocephalus were as fast as controls in reading words, but, unlike controls, they did not demonstrate an effect of spelling–sound regularity. Further, decoding speed did not contribute to reading comprehension beyond word decoding accuracy. The reading comprehension deficits of good decoders with hydrocephalus are not related to early-stage processing deficits in word recognition speed. Likely origins of comprehension failure in this group are discussed.

DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVES ON READING DISABILITIES

Reading disabilities are considered from a developmental perspective. First, the normal developmental course of reading from preschool to high school is examined. Research findings on the cognitive requirements at different stages of reading and possible sources of individual differences are then discussed. Three case vignettes illustrate common patterns of reading disabilities and their behavioral manifestations: weak decoding but good comprehension, failure to automatize, and poor recall but good decoding and fluency. Specific suggestions for the assessment of reading are offered on the basis of current theoretical knowledge of reading and reading disabilities.

The Origins of Nonverbal Sensitivity

A prospective longitudinal design was used to examine the relation between temperament and early parenting variables at age 5 and sensitivity to nonverbal cues at age 31 as measured by the Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity (PONS). The results showed that 26% of the variance in adult nonverbal sensitivity was accounted for by the childhood variables. Three predictors contributed to good adult decoding skills: easy child temperament, parental harmony, and moderate father strictness. Temperament accounted for the largest percentage of unique variance in adult nonverbal sensitivity (8.8%). No sex differences were found.

Reading But not understanding

study of 12 year olds suggests a tie to general language /eve/. U^M There is an age-old concern that young people in school are not for meaning. This concern may stem from earlier teaching practices. As early as 1831, at the Sessional School in Edinburgh, the emphasis in instruction was on pronouncing words with accuracy and fluency. Whether the young reader understood what was read was not important. Understanding, it was felt, would come later. In short, the goal of the teacher was to ensure the young reader became a proficient decoder. Usually skill in decoding and skill in comprehension go hand in hand, but this is not always the case. There are a number of children and teenagers who decode quite well yet have comprehension difficulties. There is no obvious reason why some good decoders have trouble comprehending. However, research by Watson and Clay (1975) has shown that the problem is not caused by children being given material that is too difficult. Nor is the problem due to teachers asking unanswerable questions. Instead these readers fail to comprehend material with which other good decoders have no problem. According to Goodman (1973) some readers are so obsessed with for accuracy that they forget to read for meaning. Goodman states, remedial classes are filled with youngsters in late elementary and secondary school who can sound out words but get little meaning from their reading (p. 491). The child who is sounding out words but getting little meaning is sometimes said to be calling, or even barking at print. This stereotype of the word caller suggests that an overemphasis on decoding is the cause of poor comprehension. Smith (1978) also holds this view. As he puts it, overconcern with accuracy has the effect of directing too much attention to individual

Gestalt imagery: A critical factor in language comprehension

Gestalt imagery-the ability to create imaged wholes-is a critical factor in oral and written language comprehension. Despite good decoding, good vocabulary, and adequate background experiences, many individuals experience weak gestalt imagery, thus processing "parts" rather than "wholes," from verbal stimuli, spoken or written. This contributes to a Language Comprehension Disorder that may be accompanied by a commonality of symptoms: weak reading comprehension, weak oral language comprehension, weak oral language expression, weak written language expression, difficulty following directions, and a weak sense of humor. Sequential stimulation using an inquiry technique develops gestalt imagery and results in significant improvement in reading comprehension.

The Impact of Nonverbal Communication in Organizations: A Survey of Perceptions

Five hundred and five respondents, from a wide variety of business organizations, were surveyed to gather information on their perceptions of nonverbal communication. Dividing the sample on the basis of perceived decoding ability and gender revealed several differences between the groups. Nonverbal communication was more important to self-rated good decoders than to other decoders. Better decoders relied most on facial expressions for accurate information while less skilled decoders preferred voice level or tone. Women, individually, rated themselves higher than men in decoding ability and, as a group, were perceived by both men and women to be better decoders and encoders of nonverbal cues. Women working in the education field rated themselves higher in decoding ability than any other group.Recommendations for improved communication in businesses included paying more at tention to nonverbal cues, especially the facial expressions, engaging in more eye con tact, and probing for more information when verba...

Phonological Awareness Tasks as Predictors of Decoding Ability

The performance of 38 male third- and fourth-grade reading disabled/poor decoders and above-average readers/good decoders was compared on a series of six measures of phonological awareness, including tasks that required the ability to segment, blend, and manipulate phonemes. Performance on these tasks was also correlated with phonetic decoding of pseudowords. Significant but varying intercorrelations were obtained among tasks in both groups. For the poor decoders, deletion was the most highly correlated with the other tasks. However, all good decoders performed at ceiling level on this task. For the poor decoders, deletion was significantly correlated with phonetic decoding (r = .74 and r = .78 for timed and untimed decoding measures, respectively). While all good decoders had good phonological awareness, not all those with good phonological awareness were good decoders. The results suggest that tasks that require blending and manipulation of phonemes, in addition to segmentation, may predict decoding ability best.

The effect of nonverbal sensitivity on social interaction

This study examined the relation between decoding ability and quality of dyadic interaction of college roommate pairs. It was found that pairs with members who were both high in decoding (HH pairs) rated their interactions somewhat more positively than pairs in which one or both roommates were low (HL and LL pairs). This effect was more pronounced for ratings reflecting emotional sharing (e.g., gave and received support) than for ratings reflecting influence (e.g., initiated the interaction). For emotional sharing only, the difference between the HH pairs and the HL plus LL pairs was significant. The relative advantage of the HH pairs in emotional sharing and relative disadvantage in influence was more pronounced for males and less for females, suggesting a reversal of traditional sex-role behavior. When differences in decoding ability within roommate pairs were considered, the results showed that, in dyads with at least one good decoder (HH and HL pairs), the interaction was rated more positively by the roommate who was lower in decoding ability. The concept and measure of decoding ability and their implications for interaction and sex-role behavior were discussed.

Mimille: Une méthode interactive micro-informatisée de labio-lecture

A computer-aided speechreading assessment and training system is presented. It is intended to be one component of a comprehensive aural rehabilitation program for preretirement adults with acquired mild-to-moderate hearing loss. Each lesson focuses on a different viseme which is practiced using the 'discourse tracking' method. The system allows the evaluation of the basic skills necessary for lipreading, i.e. good visual speech decoding and effective use of lingustic redundancy and transmitter feedback, by evaluating separately tracking rate, strategy, and types of errors.

The Effects of Vocalics and Nonverbal Sensitivity on Compliance A Speech Accommodation Theory Explanation

A speech accommodation theory explanation for the interaction between a receiver's decoding ability and a speaker's voice tone on compliance with requests for help was tested. It was predicted that good decoders would speak faster than poor decoders. Speech accommodation theory predicts that given this speech style difference, good decoders would make more favorable interpretations of a fast request that converged toward their faster speech rate; whereas poor decoders would make more favorable interpretations of a slow request that converged toward their slower speech rate. Requests receiving more favorable evaluations should result in greater compliance, because compliance with requests for help was predicted to follow an identification process. An experiment involving 168 participants confirmed this explanation. Good decoders spoke faster than poor decoders. Moreover, good decoders rated the fast request as more intimate and immediate, while poor decoders rated the slow request as more intimate and immediate. Good decoders, in turn, complied more with the fast request, which they rated more intimate and immediate, whereas poor decoders complied more with the slow request, which they rated more intimate and immediate.

The Effects of Vocalics and Nonverbal Sensitivity on Compliance A Replication and Extension

An interaction between receiver ability to decode vocalic cues and speaker vocalic patterns in obtaining compliance was investigated in this study. Expectancy theory was offered as an explanation for this interaction. Because changes in vocalic patterns can violate expectations, receivers make consistent interpretations of these vocalic cues, and evaluations of these interpretations may be affected by decoder predispositions toward communication that, in turn, produce differential perceptions of source reward. Respondents were interviewed by trained encoders who used neutral, pleasant, and hostile vocal patterns. Compliance was assessed by asking for a donation of time to communication research. Follow-up surveys measured perceived relational messages, interviewer credibility, vocal pleasantness, and the degree to which the vocalic pattern was expected. The predicted disordinal interaction between decoding ability and voice condition was found. Decoding ability did not correlate with predispositions, nullifying source reward as a factor in the evaluation of vocalic violations. It was suggested that preferences for vocalic patterns influenced evaluations: Good decoders may have preferred affiliative cues and thus complied more with pleasant voices, whereas poor decoders may have preferred assertive patterns and complied more with hostile voices.

Decoding as a Component of Reading Comprehension among Secondary Students

The Iowa Tests of Educational Development vocabulary test was administered once to ninth graders following standard procedures (ITED-V) and again using the alternate form in which students listened to a tape-recording of items (PROMPTED-V). Word meaning knowledge was controlled by entering the PROMPTED-V score first into a multiple regression equation to predict reading comprehension. The ITED-V score made a significant addition to the prediction equation, suggesting that the ability to decode printed words is a component of comprehension performance. Poor decoders were operationally defined as students with an ITED-V score more than two standard errors below their PROMPTED-V score. Their reading comprehension, as indicated by several measures, was significantly below that of good decoders who showed no discrepancy between their PROMPTED-V and ITED-V scores. Among poor decoders, there was a range in comprehension performance which suggests the possible influence of a third component of comprehension, such as ability to use contextual prediction.

A Fake Process Approach to Data Compression

The problem of designing a good decoder for a timeinvariant tree-coding data compression system is equivalent to that of finding a good low rate "fake process" for the original source, where the fake is produced by a time-invariant nonlinear filtering of an independent, identically distributed sequence of uniformly distributed discrete random variables and "goodness" is measured by the <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">\bar{\rho}</tex> -distance between the fake and the original source. Several simple ad hoc techniques for obtaining such fake processes are introduced and shown by simulation to provide an improvement of typically 1-2 dB over optimum quantization, delta modulation, and predictive quantization for one-bit per symbol compression of Gaussian memoryless, autoregressive, and moving average sources. In addition, the fake process viewpoint provides a new intuitive explanation of why delta modulation and predictive quantization work as well as they do on Gaussian autoregressive sources.

Color Decoding a PCM NTSC Television Signal

Several techniques are developed for digital color decoding of NTSC television signals pulse-code modulated at 10.7-MHz rates (three times the color subcarrier frequency) and 14.3-MHz rates (four times the color subcarrier frequency). Digital comb filtering is also explored as a way to achieve superior color decoding. Encoding PCM NTSC television at the 14.3-MHz rate was found to afford the best algorithms for color decoding. A different PCM technique called Phase Alternating Line Encoding (PALE) permits encoding at 10.7 MHz and allows effective digital comb filtering and good color decoding. In the PALE technique, the phase of the 10.7-MHz digital encode command signal is inverted on adjacent television lines. Straight PCM encoding at 10.7 MHz is a poor third choice for comb filtering and color decoding applications.

The Effectiveness of Tracing for Good and Poor Decoders

The effect of visual, auditory and tracing cues on learning was determined for good and poor decoders. Twenty first graders scoring above the median on a test of word knowledge and twenty scoring below were assigned to four instructional groups of ten each. Two words in each of six sessions were presented by stressing visual cues, two by stressing auditory cues, and two by stressing tracing cues. Analysis of variance indicated that poor decoders learned more words when visual cues and auditory cues were stressed than when tracing cues were emphasized (p .05). It may not be appropriate to stress tracing cues for first graders having decoding difficulty. The need for longitudinal research is indicated.