Reading Aloud Performance Research Articles

Examining the Impact of a Digital Reading Progress Tool on Saudi L2 Learners’ Reading Aloud Performance and Proficiency

: Few studies have considered the use of digital reading tools for improving the fluency and proficiency of Saudi learners of English as a second language (ESL). Hence, in this study, the researcher investigated the impact of Microsoft’s Digital Reading Progress tool on 30 Saudi ESL learners’ reading performance and proficiency. The participants were all at the B1 intermediate English language level in academic ESL, according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) English language proficiency test. The students were given one reading passage per week, and the researcher examined their performance in reading aloud over a period of four weeks using the Digital Reading Progress tool. The researcher employed a quantitative analysis, including post-assessments, to measure five aspects of participants’ reading performance: mispronunciation of words, self-corrections, omissions, repetitions, and correct words per minute. The findings revealed significant improvements in participants’ reading performance, fluency, and accuracy, as evidenced by increased accuracy after engaging with the Digital Reading Progress tool, increased scores across the five rated categories, and reduced pronunciation and word omission errors. This study contributes to the growing body of research on technology-enhanced language learning by demonstrating the positive impact of the Digital Reading Progress tool on L2 learners’ reading performance and proficiency. The findings have practical implications for ESL instructors in integrating digital tools as valuable pedagogical resources for enhancing L2 reading learning and performance.

Production and Comprehension of Prosodic Boundary Marking in Persons With Unilateral Brain Lesions.

Persons with unilateral brain damage in the right hemisphere (RH) or left hemisphere (LH) show limitations in processing linguistic prosody, with yet inconclusive results on their ability to process prosodically marked structural boundaries for syntactic ambiguity resolution. We aimed at systematically investigating production and comprehension of three prosodic cues (f 0 range, final lengthening, and pause) at structural boundaries in coordinate sequences in participants with right hemisphere brain damage (RHDP) and participants with left hemisphere brain damage (LHDP). Twenty RHDP and 15 LHDP participated in our study. Comprehension experiment: Participants and a control group listened to coordinate name sequences with internal grouping by a prosodically marked structural boundary (grouped condition, e.g., "(Gabi und Leni) # und Nina") or without internal grouping (ungrouped condition, e.g., "Gabi und Leni und Nina") and had to identify the target condition. The strength and combinations of prosodic cues in the stimuli were manipulated. Production experiment: Participants were asked to produce coordinate sequences in the two conditions (grouped, ungrouped) in two different tasks: a Reading Aloud and a Repetition experiment. Accuracy of participants' productions was subsequently assessed in a rating study and productions were analyzed with respect to use of prosodic cues. In the Comprehension experiment, RHDP and LHDP had overall lower identification accuracies than unimpaired control participants and LHDP were found to have particular problems with boundary identification when the pause cue was reduced. In production, LHDP and RHDP employed all three prosodic cues for boundary marking, but struggled to clearly mark prosodic boundaries in 28% of all productions. Both groups showed better performance in reading aloud than in repetition. LHDP relied more on using f 0 range and pause duration to prosodically mark structural boundaries, whereas RHDP employed final lengthening more vigorously than LHDP in reading aloud. We conclude that processing of linguistic prosody is affected in RHDP and LHDP, but not completely impaired. Therefore, prosody can serve as a relevant communicative resource. However, it should also be considered as a target area for assessment and treatment in both groups. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21637505.

How well imageability, concreteness, perceptual strength, and action strength predict recognition memory, lexical decision, and reading aloud performance

ABSTRACT We examined how well imageability, concreteness, perceptual strength, and action strength predicted recognition memory, lexical decision, and reading aloud performance. We used our imageability estimates [Cortese, M. J., & Fugett, A. (2004). Imageability ratings for 3,000 monosyllabic words. Behavior Methods and Research, Instrumentation, & Computers, 36(3), 384–387. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195585; Schock, J., Cortese, M. J., & Khanna, M. M. (2012a). Imageability ratings for 3,000 disyllabic words. Behavior Research Methods, 44(2), 374–379. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-011-0162-0], concreteness norms of Brysbaert and colleagues [Brysbaert, M., Warriner, A. B., & Kuperman, V. (2014). Concreteness ratings for 40 thousand generally known English lemmas. Behavior Research Methods, 46(3), 904–911. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-013-0403-5], and perceptual and action strength ratings of Lynott and colleagues [Lynott, D., Connell, L., Brysbaert, M., Brand, J., & Carney, J. (2020). The lancaster sensorimotor norms: Multidimensional measures of perceptual and action strength for 40,000 English words. Behavior Research Methods, 52(3), 1271–1291. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-019-01316-z]. Our results indicate imageability is the best predictor, but methodological differences between ratings studies may contribute to the results. Surprisingly, action strength was negatively (albeit weakly) related to recognition memory. Analyses of item zRTs from the English lexicon project indicate these variables were not strong predictors of reading aloud or lexical decision performance. However, there is a small, consistent positive relationship between concreteness and zRTs (i.e., a facilitative abstractness effect). We believe researchers should either employ or control for imageability rather than concreteness, perceptual strength, or action strength when conducting recognition memory experiments. In addition, image-based codes generated at encoding strengthen memory traces but do not provide major inputs into reading aloud and lexical decision processes. Also, the facilitative abstractness effect on lexical decision and reading aloud zRTs may reflect more robust lexical representations for abstract words than concrete words, and that these two constructs are distinct.

Computer-mediated instruction using ondoku practice for developing elementary school students’ pronunciation skills

Abstract This article reports on an elementary school teacher’s research project that evaluated a new teaching practice for Japanese elementary school students. The project was conducted in two fifth-grade classes comprising a total of 59 students. The teacher-researcher designed a computer-mediated instructional activity consisting of four-steps called ondoku, which engaged individual students in reading a given story aloud. It involved the students (a) studying a model reading-aloud video, (b) video-recording their own reading-aloud performance, (c) receiving teacher corrective feedback on their pronunciation and (d) studying the feedback and recording and then submitting a second performance. All the steps were carried out in sequence using individual iPads. The teacher also administered a questionnaire to examine students’ engagement in and perspectives regarding the activity. Analysis involved comparing the pronunciation in the first and second corrected video files. The results showed that feedback led to successful repair 62 times out of the 108 corrections. In 16 instances, the students were aware of the error and attempted repair but still produced an incorrect utterance. In 30 instances, the students made no repair. Reflecting on the results and the students’ responses to the questionnaire, the teacher proposed some changes to the activity.

AoA effects in reading aloud and lexical decision: Locating the (semantic) locus in terms of the number of backward semantic associations.

In the present study, we analyse data from the English Lexicon Project to assess the extent to which age of acquisition (AoA) effects on word processing stem from the number of semantic associations tied to a word. We show that the backward number of associates (bNoA; that is, the log transformed number of words that produce the target word in free association) is an important predictor of both lexical decision and reading aloud performance, and reduces the typical AoA effect as represented by subject ratings in both tasks. Although the AoA effect is reduced, it remains a significant predictor of performance above and beyond bNoA. We conclude that the semantic locus of AoA effects can be found in the number of backward connections to the word, and that the independent AoA effect is due to network plasticity. We discuss how computational models currently explain AoA effects, and how bNoA may affect their processing.

Examining word processing via a megastudy of conditional reading aloud.

Results from a megastudy on conditional reading aloud for 2,145 monosyllabic words are reported. In stepwise regression analyses, the predictor variables accounted for over 66% of the reaction time (RT) variance. Linear mixed effect modelling on log RT indicated that every variable that related to RT in either reading aloud or lexical decision also related to RT in conditional reading aloud. Notably, differences among tasks were observed. Specifically, lexical decision showed stronger reliance on semantic information than the other two tasks, but conditional reading aloud also showed strong reliance on semantic information. Interestingly, feedback consistency affected reading aloud and conditional reading but not lexical decision. Pairwise correlations revealed that conditional reading aloud performance showed moderately strong relationships to lexical decision and reading aloud performance, whereas reading aloud and lexical decision performance were weakly related to each other. Conditional reading aloud produces reliable data that can be used to examine word processing. Theoretical challenges moving forward include how to best conceptualise and model processes involved in this task.

Automatic evaluation of reading aloud performance in children

Evaluating children's reading aloud proficiency is typically a task done by teachers on an individual basis, where reading time and wrong words are marked manually. A computational tool that assists with recording reading tasks, automatically analyzing them and outputting performance related metrics could be a significant help to teachers. Working towards that goal, this work presents an approach to automatically predict the overall reading aloud ability of primary school children by employing automatic speech processing methods. Reading tasks were designed focused on sentences and pseudowords, so as to obtain complementary information from the two distinct assignments. A dataset was collected with recordings of 284 children aged 6–10 years reading in native European Portuguese. The most common disfluencies identified include intra-word pauses, phonetic extensions, false starts, repetitions, and mispronunciations. To automatically detect reading disfluencies, we first target extra events by employing task-specific lattices for decoding that allow syllable-based false starts as well as repetitions of words and sequences of words. Then, mispronunciations are detected based on the log likelihood ratio between the recognized and target words. The opinions of primary school teachers were gathered as ground truth of overall reading aloud performance, who provided 0–5 scores closely related to the expected performance at the end of each grade. To predict these scores, various features were extracted by automatic annotation and regression models were trained. Gaussian process regression proved to be the most successful approach. Feature selection from both sentence and pseudoword tasks give the closest predictions, with a correlation of 0.944 compared to the teachers' grading. Compared to the use of manual annotation, where the best models obtained give a correlation of 0.949, there was a relative decrease of only 0.5% for using automatic annotations to extract features. The error rate of predicted scores relative to ground truth also proved to be smaller than the deviation of evaluators’ opinion per child.

Effects of Lexicality and Regularity on Reading Aloud Performance in Aphasia

배경 및 목적: 의미성 및 규칙성에 따른 읽기 과제에서 실어증 환자군과 정상군의 명사형 자극 읽기 수행률을 비교하고 그 특징을 살펴보고자 한다. 방법: 실어증 환자 20명과 정상 성인 20명을 대상으로 하였으며, 의미성 및 규칙성에 따라 규칙 단어, 불규칙 단어, 규칙 비단어, 불규칙 비단어 조건에서 2음절 명사형 읽기 자극을 선정하였다. 대상자는 제시된...

Is reading-aloud performance in megastudies systematically influenced by the list context?

To examine megastudy context effects, 585 critical words, each with a different orthographic rime, were placed at the beginning or end of a 2614-word megastudy of reading aloud. Sixty participants (30 participants in each condition) responded to these words. Specific predictors examined for change between beginning and end conditions were frequency, length, feedforward rime consistency, feedforward onset consistency, orthographic neighbourhood size, age of acquisition (AoA), and imageability. While it took longer to respond to items at the end of the experiment than items at the beginning of the experiment, there was very little change in the effects of the specific variables assessed. Thus, there is little evidence of list context effects influencing the estimates of the predictor variables in large-scale megastudies.

For richer or poorer? Imageability effects in semantic dementia patients’ reading aloud

The degree to which a word's meaning evokes a mental image exerts an influence on performance across a variety of conceptual and linguistic tasks. In normal healthy participants, this effect takes the form of an advantage for high over low imageability words. Consideration of the influence of imageability on performance of patients with semantic dementia can provide information concerning its cognitive and neural bases. Semantic dementia patients show deficits in conceptual processing tasks, and an associated enhancement of the advantage for high over low imageability words. Semantic dementia patients also show deficits in linguistic processing tasks, including reading aloud words with inconsistent spelling–sound correspondences. This study provides the first systematic exploration of the influence of imageability on semantic dementia patients’ reading aloud performance. Over 10 cases, the imageability effect seen for inconsistent words was actually reversed in reaction times, with faster performance for low than high imageability items. The same reversal was observed for inconsistent words when the frequency of legitimate alternative reading of components errors was considered, and this reversed effect grew larger with increasing semantic impairment. This result is interpreted in terms of the development of stronger connections along the direct pathway between spelling and sound for low than high imageability items that are then revealed under diminished semantic activation. This interpretation emphasises the interaction between form and meaning that occurs throughout learning in connectionist models.

Reading Aloud Performance and Listening Ability in an L2: The Case of College-Level Japanese EFL Users

Recent advance in neuropsychology has evidenced a facilitative role of sensorimotor activity for the development in L2 speech perception. The study attempted to examine the relationship between reading aloud (RA) performance, grammatical knowledge and listening ability with 31 college-level Japanese EFL users. The result demonstrated highly significant correlations between all the variables, and the subsequent multiple regression analysis also indicated RA significantly accounting for listening. Supplementary analyses dividing the participants by listening ability demonstrated that while significant correlation was maintained between L2 knowledge and listening with less-proficient listeners, it disappeared with proficient listeners; in contrast, significant correlation between RA and listening performance was maintained in both groups, indicating that production accuracy/fluency still played an important role in advanced L2 listening.

Jargon in reading aloud sparing Arabic digits but not number words

Jargon in reading aloud sparing Arabic digits but not number words

What lies beneath: A comparison of reading aloud in pure alexia and semantic dementia

Exaggerated effects of word length upon reading-aloud performance define pure alexia, but have also been observed in semantic dementia. Some researchers have proposed a reading-specific account, whereby performance in these two disorders reflects the same cause: impaired orthographic processing. In contrast, according to the primary systems view of acquired reading disorders, pure alexia results from a basic visual processing deficit, whereas degraded semantic knowledge undermines reading performance in semantic dementia. To explore the source of reading deficits in these two disorders, we compared the reading performance of 10 pure alexic and 10 semantic dementia patients, matched in terms of overall severity of reading deficit. The results revealed comparable frequency effects on reading accuracy, but weaker effects of regularity in pure alexia than in semantic dementia. Analysis of error types revealed a higher rate of letter-based errors and a lower rate of regularization responses in pure alexia than in semantic dementia. Error responses were most often words in pure alexia but most often nonwords in semantic dementia. Although all patients made some letter substitution errors, these were characterized by visual similarity in pure alexia and phonological similarity in semantic dementia. Overall, the data indicate that the reading deficits in pure alexia and semantic dementia arise from impairments of visual processing and knowledge of word meaning, respectively. The locus and mechanisms of these impairments are placed within the context of current connectionist models of reading.

Developmental Differences in Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) Reading Aloud Growth Rates Between English-Speaking Students and English Language Learners in Grade 8

The purpose of this study was to examine the developmental difference in curriculum-based measurement (CBM) reading aloud performance between Grade 8 English-speaking students and English language learners (ELLs) using two theories of reading development: compensatory model and cumulative model. Fifty non-ELLs and 133 ELLs were administered the same CBM reading aloud probes in fall, winter, and spring. The simplex model and latent growth model were used to identify the most appropriate reading model for each group. The results revealed that the compensatory model was appropriate for both groups. Limitations and educational implications are presented.

Pirates at parties: Letter position processing in developing readers

There has been much recent interest in letter position coding in adults, but little is known about the development of this process in children learning to read. Here, the letter position coding abilities of 127 children in Grades 2, 3, and 4 (aged 7–10years) were examined by comparing their performance in reading aloud “migratable” words (e.g., bread, three, diary) with that in reading aloud words without potential for migration (e.g., heard, boot, bitter). Across all three grade levels, children made many more errors on migratable words than on non-migratable words, and the proportion of migration errors did not decrease with increasing grade level. Within each grade, a tendency to make a high proportion of migration errors was not associated with deficits in other reading subprocesses or with general lexical guessing; indeed, it was associated with strong lexical reading skills. We conclude that letter position coding is generally fragile in developing readers and that this interacts with lexical knowledge to produce migration errors in reading.

Neural networks underlying contributions from semantics in reading aloud

Reading is an essential part of contemporary society, yet much is still unknown about the physiological underpinnings of its information processing components. Two influential cognitive models of reading, the connectionist and dual-route cascaded models, offer very different accounts, yet evidence for one or the other remains equivocal. These models differ in several ways, including the role of semantics (word meaning) in mapping spelling to sound. We used a new effective connectivity algorithm, IMaGES, to provide a network-level perspective on these network-level models. Left hemisphere regions of interest were defined based on main effects in functional magnetic resonance imaging and included two regions linked with semantic processing—angular gyrus (AG) and inferior temporal sulcus (ITS)—and two regions linked with phonological processing—posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG) and posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG). Participants read aloud words of high or low spelling-sound consistency, word frequency, and imageability. Only the connectionist model predicted increased contributions from semantic areas with those computing phonology for low-consistency words. Effective connectivity analyses revealed that areas supporting semantic processing (e.g., the ITS) interacted with phonological areas (e.g., the pSTG), with the pattern changing as a function of word properties. Connectivity from semantic to phonological areas emerged for high- compared to low-imageability words, and a similar pattern emerged for low-consistency words, though only under certain conditions. Analyses of individual differences also showed that variation in the strength of modulation of ITS by AG was associated with reading aloud performance. Overall, these results suggest that connections with semantic processing areas are not only associated with reading aloud, but that these connections are also associated with optimal reading performance.

The consequences of progressive phonological impairment for reading aloud

The ‘primary systems’ view of reading disorders proposes that there are no neural regions devoted exclusively to reading, and therefore that acquired dyslexias should reliably co-occur with deficits in more general underlying capacities. This perspective predicted that surface dyslexia, a selective deficit in reading aloud ‘exception’ words (those with atypical spelling-sound characteristics), should be a consistent feature of semantic dementia, a progressive disorder of conceptual knowledge, and just such a pattern has been observed in previous research. In a similar vein, one might expect the gradual deterioration of phonological processing seen in the nonfluent forms of progressive aphasia to be accompanied by phonological dyslexia, a selective deficit in reading of unfamiliar letter strings, i.e., nonwords. The present study, reporting a case-series consideration of reading-aloud data from 16 progressive nonfluent aphasic patients, revealed a pattern in which both low-frequency exception word and nonword reading were comparably compromised. The severity of the reading disorder was predicted by scores on the expressive language task of picture naming but not the receptive task of spoken word-to-picture matching. Our hypothesis that a phonological deficit underpins diminished performance for both naming and reading was supported by the finding that reading-aloud performance was predicted specifically by the rate of phonological errors in picture naming. Moreover, the strength of this relationship was similar for low-frequency exception words and nonwords, suggesting that reading deficits for these two types of items in this disorder shared a common cause: a progressive impairment of phonological processing.

Semantic involvement in reading aloud: Evidence from a nonword training study.

The current research uses a novel methodology to examine the role of semantics in reading aloud. Participants were trained to read aloud 2 sets of novel words (i.e., nonwords such as bink): some with meanings (semantic) and some without (nonsemantic). A comparison of reading aloud performance between these 2 sets of novel words was used to provide an indicator of the importance of semantic information in reading aloud. In Experiment 1, in contrast to expectations, reading aloud performance was not better for novel words in the semantic condition. In Experiment 2, the training of novel words was modified to reflect more realistic steps of lexical acquisition: Reading aloud performance became faster and more accurate for novel words in the semantic condition, but only for novel words with inconsistent pronunciations. This semantic advantage for inconsistent novel words was again observed when a subset of participants from Experiment 2 was retested 6-12 months later (in Experiment 3). These findings provide support for a limited but significant role for semantics in the reading aloud process.

The impact of progressive semantic loss on reading aloud

The role of semantics in reading aloud remains controversial. To explore this issue, the current study examined the impact of semantic loss on reading-aloud performance in 7 patients with semantic dementia. The results revealed a heterogenous pattern of reading difficulties. Of the patients, 2 selectively made errors on inconsistent words (i.e., surface dyslexia), 4 had a generalized reading deficit with increased errors on consistent words, inconsistent words, and nonwords, while the remaining patient had relatively intact reading-aloud accuracy. All patients had longer reading latencies on real words than controls. The relationship between the reading and semantic deficits in the patients was examined at the item-specific level. This suggested that reading-aloud errors were related to the semantic impairment for inconsistent words but not consistent words. In contrast, semantic loss was related to longer latencies for both consistent and inconsistent words. These findings support models of reading that include a role for semantics in the reading-aloud process.

Verbal aptitude and the use of grammar information in Serbian language

The research presented in this paper was an attempt to find differences in the use of grammatical information carried by the function words in Serbian. The aim was to determine the level of word processing at which grammatical information shows its differential effects in groups of subjects who themselves differ in verbal ability. For this purpose, the psycholinguistic tasks applied were grammatically primed reading aloud and grammatically primed grammatical classification with an appropriate control of extra-linguistic factors that may have affected aforementioned tasks. Verbal aptitude was assessed in a psychometric manner, and the subjects were divided into "high verbal" and "low verbal" groups. Taking into account statistical control of extra-linguistic factors, the results indicate that groups of high verbal and low verbal subjects cannot be differentiated based on reading aloud performance. The high verbal subjects, however, were more efficient in grammatical classification than low verbal subjects. The results also indicated that the presence of grammatical information embedded in function words-primes had a stronger effect on word processing in low verbal group. Such pattern of results testify to the advantage of high verbal subjects in lexical and post lexical processing, while no differences were established in the word recognition processes. The implications of these findings were considered in terms of test construction for the assessment of verbal ability in Serbian language. .