Sentence Reading Task Research Articles

English word recognition and word integration skills of native Arabic- and Japanese-speaking learners of English as a second language

This study investigated the effects of first language word-level reading skills on the development of English as a second language (ESL) word-level reading skills. A crosslinguistic analysis indicates that native Arabic and Japanese speakers are likely to encounter different types of ESL word-level reading difficulties. Specifically, native Arab speakers are likely to exhibit difficulties with prelexical ESL word recognition processes, whereas native Japanese speakers are likely to exhibit difficulties with on-line ESL word integration processes that integrate words into phrase/clause structures for comprehension. Results from a lexical decision task showed that a group of Japanese ESL learners had significantly faster and more accurate word recognition skills compared to a proficiency-matched Arab ESL group. In contrast, both groups read words within sentences in a sentence reading task at the same speed, though the Arab ESL group was significantly more accurate in integrating words into larger phrase and clause units and comprehending them than the Japanese ESL group. These results indicate that Arab and Japanese ESL students have different word-level reading difficulties, implicating different learning needs and pedagogical interventions for developing ESL reading proficiency.

The effects of morphology on the processing of compound words: evidence from naming, lexical decisions and eye fixations.

The use of lexemes during the recognition of spatially unified familiar English compounds was examined in naming, lexical decision and sentence-reading tasks by manipulating beginning and ending lexeme frequencies while controlling overall compound frequencies. All tasks revealed robust ending lexeme frequency effects, with compound processing being more effective when the ending lexeme was a high-frequency word. Beginning lexeme frequency effects were more elusive and dependent on task demands. Eye movements, recorded during sentence reading, also indicated that the effects of ending lexemes occurred after the first fixation during compound viewing. Together, the results suggest either that the ending lexeme is used as an access code to locate the meaning of the full compound word or that its meaning is coactive with the meaning of the full compound.

An electrophysiological study of dyslexic and control adults in a sentence reading task

Event-related potentials and cued-recall performance were used to compare dyslexic and control adult subjects. Sentences that ended either congruously or incongruously were presented visually, one word at a time, at fast (stimulus-onset-asynchrony (SOA)=100 ms) or slow (SOA=700 ms) rates of presentation. Results revealed (1) a large effect of presentation rate that started with the N1–P2 components and lasted for the entire recording period, (2) larger N400 components for dyslexic than control subjects, at slow presentation rates, to both congruous and incongruous endings and (3) a large ERPs difference related to memory (Dm effect) that did not differentiate controls from dyslexics but was larger at slow than at fast rates of presentation. These findings indicate that the reading impairment observed in the present group of adult dyslexics is more likely to result from difficulties integrating the meaning of words within a sentence context than from pure sensory processing deficits.

Word frequency effects on the processing of subject-verb number agreement.

This paper examines the role of word frequency in the computation of subject-verb number agreement. Previous research in both production and comprehension has demonstrated that processing difficulties can arise in sentence structures containing a singular subject noun followed by a plural "distractor" noun, as in The key to the cabinets.... A whole sentence reading task was employed to determine whether the relative frequency with which the distractor noun appears in its singular or plural form would affect the degree of processing difficulty experienced by readers. Results suggest that the agreement process is, indeed, sensitive to this factor and this finding is compatible with activation-based accounts of the implementation of number agreement.

Intonational disambiguation in sentence production and comprehension.

Speakers' prosodic marking of syntactic constituency is often measured in sentence reading tasks that lack realistic situational constraints on speaking. Results from such studies can be criticized because the pragmatic goals of readers differ dramatically from those of speakers in typical conversation. On the other hand, recordings of unscripted speech do not readily yield the carefully controlled contrasts required for many research purposes. Our research employs a cooperative game task, in which two speakers use utterances from a predetermined set to negotiate moves around gameboards. Results from a set of early versus late closure ambiguities suggest that speakers signal this syntactic difference with prosody even when the utterance context fully disambiguates the structure. Phonetic and phonological analyses show reliable prosodic disambiguation in speakers' productions; results of a comprehension task indicate that listeners can successfully use prosodic cues to categorize syntactically ambiguous fragments as portions of early or late closure utterances.

Phonemic effects in reading comprehension and text memory

AbstractTwo experiments investigated the role of phonemic information in adult reading comprehension and replicated the visual tongue‐twister effect in a new paradigm–a modified probe memory task. College students took longer to read sentences that repeated word initial consonants (tongue‐twisters) than matched control sentences. Equally important, subjects also took longer to respond to probe words from tongue‐twisters. Slower response times in both the sentence reading task and the probe memory task indicate that the tongue‐twister effect is indeed phonemic in nature and that phonemic information is used in memory during comprehension.

After Instructions to Follow and Break a Rule

Given a sentence reading task, thirty-one junior college students were asked to formulate a rule for choosing which sentence to read. They were then given instructions to follow that rule, break it, follow it, and break it in twenty card sequences. Almost half the participants had some difficulty stating the initial formulation of their rules. Despite this, the great majority of participants complied closely with the instructions to follow and break their rules. Persons who had difficulty stating their original rules also tended to have difficulty giving a consistent description of their actions.

Priming the Comprehension of Metaphors

A series of experiments examined the comprehension of metaphors such as "TIME IS MONEY." The task of Experiments 1 to 3 required participants to decide whether two sequentially presented sentences were related. Reaction time latencies to read and respond to the second sentence of each sequence were analyzed for different types of initial sentences. In Experiment 1, the initial sentence in each sequence was either a superordinate metaphor ("TIME IS MONEY"), a tautology (TIME IS TIME), or a contrasting superordinate metaphor ("TIME IS A RACE"); the second sentence in each sequence was a metaphor instantiating the superordinate metaphor ("HE SPENT HIS TIME FOOLISHLY"). In Experiment 2, the superordinate metaphor ("TIME IS MONEY"), its topic (time), its vehicle (money), or a different superordinate metaphor formed by reversing the topic and vehicle ("MONEY IS TIME") preceded the metaphor ("He spent his time foolishly"). In Experiment 3, the metaphor ("He spent his time foolishly") followed either a metaphor instantiating the same superordinate metaphor ("HE WASTED THE OPPORTUNITY"), a literal expression (He ignored the opportunity), or a metaphor instantiating a contrasting superordinate metaphor ("He jumped the gun"). Experiments 4 and 5 replicated Experiments 2 and 3, respectively, using a sentence-reading task. The results indicate that superordinate metaphors, their vehicles, and metaphors instantiating the same superordinate metaphors facilitate comprehension of metaphors. Conversely, contrasting superordinate metaphors, topic-vehicle reversals, and metaphors instantiating contrasting superordinate metaphors interfere with metaphor comprehension.

The neurological substrates for prosodic aspects of speech

The ability to comprehend and produce the stress contrast between noun compounds and noun phrases (e.g., gréenhouse vs. green hóuse) was examined for 8 nonfluent aphasics, 7 fluent aphasics, 7 right hemisphere damaged (RHD) patients, and 22 normal controls. The aphasics performed worse than normal controls on the comprehension task, and the RHD group performed as well as normals. The ability to produce stress contrasts was tested with a sentence-reading task; acoustic measurements revealed that no nonfluent aphasic used pitch to distinguish noun compounds from phrases, but two used duration. All but one of the RHD patients and all but one of the normals produced pitch and/or duration cues. These results suggest that linguistic prosody is processed by the left hemisphere and that with brain damage the ability to produce pitch and duration cues may be dissociated at the lexical level.

Phonological recording and use of spelling-sound rules in reading of sentences

Phonological recoding in reading may be accomplished by use of one or both of two different mechanisms—spelling-sound rules and word-specific associations. The three experiments reported focus on phonological recoding in fluent reading of meaningful sentences, and ask whether spelling-sound rules play a role in this process. The results show that effects attributed to spelling-sound rule use—effects previously found in lexical decision tasks with single words—emerge also in sentence-reading tasks. These effects include inhibition on words with similar spellings and different pronounciations and exception word/ regular word differences. It is concluded that phonological recoding and spelling-sound rule use continue to be important even for fluent readers.

Reading senseless sentences: brain potentials reflect semantic incongruity.

In a sentence reading task, words that occurred out of context were associated with specific types of event-related brain potentials. Words that were physically aberrant (larger than normal) elecited a late positive series of potentials, whereas semantically inappropriate words elicited a late negative wave (N400). The N400 wave may be an electrophysiological sign of the "reprocessing" of semantically anomalous information.