Slow Reading Research Articles

Use of Parsing Heuristics in the Comprehension of Passive Sentences: Evidence from Dyslexia and Individual Differences.

This study examined the comprehension of passive sentences in order to investigate whether individuals with dyslexia rely on parsing heuristics in language comprehension to a greater extent than non-dyslexic readers. One hundred adults (50 dyslexics and 50 controls) read active and passive sentences, and we also manipulated semantic plausibility. Eye movements were monitored, while participants read each sentence, and afterwards, participants answered a comprehension question. We also assessed verbal intelligence and working memory in all participants. Results showed dyslexia status interacted with sentence structure and plausibility, such that participants with dyslexia showed significantly more comprehension errors with passive and implausible sentence. With respect to verbal intelligence and working memory, we found that individuals with lower verbal intelligence were overall more likely to make comprehension errors, and individuals with lower working memory showed particular difficulties with passive and implausible sentences. For reading times, we found that individuals with dyslexia were overall slower readers. These findings suggest that (1) individuals with dyslexia do rely on heuristics to a greater extent than do non-dyslexic individuals, and (2) individual differences variables (e.g., verbal intelligence and working memory) are also related to the use of parsing heuristics. For the latter, lower ability individuals tended to be more consistent with heuristic processing (i.e., good-enough representations).

Participation in Intervention Programmes of Children with Poor Reading Skills in Hungary

In this century, the value of information has become more significant; reflecting this change, focus has shifted to preparing pupils for the functional use of reading. Therefore, the latest international assessments of reading literacy are set up to address this kind of knowledge. Significant numbers of individuals are performing below the minimum level in these assessments in Hungary, signalling lower capacity for participation in the community. When attempting to eliminate functional illiteracy, it is crucial to analyse the present support system, and the efficiency of recognising reading problems in the early stages, in order to improve the provision of education systematically. When examining the probable causes of the struggle to comprehend texts, one of the prerequisites of understanding written language is appropriate decoding. This research focuses on investigating the access to intervention programmes of 5th-grade children with poor reading skills. The speed and accuracy of the aloud reading of 957 pupils attending mainstream classrooms were measured and compared to the data regarding the participation in rehabilitation programmes. The most relevant finding of the research was that only less than half of the children with poor reading skills receive help to improve their performance; 55% of slow readers and 60% of non-accurate readers were left without support, even though their performance is significantly worse than that of their peers. This finding indicates the need to revise the screening system and necessitates more extensive and less diagnosis-based access to intervention programmes.

Predictive Skills and Reading Efficiency of College English Based on Multimedia Technology

Slow reading speed is a common problem among Chinese college students’ English learning, limiting the amount of reading done and thus directly affecting English-level improvement. Teachers in English classes place a premium on improving students’ reading skills but the results are not immediately apparent. Even if many students have strong vocabulary and grammar skills, they will never be able to read English fluently. Teachers should prioritize not only students’ knowledge acquisition and intelligence development but also the development of students’ interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence in order to maximize their potential. This paper uses multimedia technology to investigate the role of multimedia technology in improving college English-reading efficiency and analyzes how teachers and students can play a positive role in improving the efficiency of college multimedia teaching using data mining technology, which shows that students’ predictive reading skills can help them improve their reading efficiency. Teachers can also supervise and ask questions about students’ learning progress via computers, communicate effectively with students, and provide timely feedback on students’ learning results using multimedia technology.

Influence of road traffic noise peaks on reading task performance and disturbance in a laboratory context

The influence of fluctuating road traffic noise on perceived disturbance during a reading task as well as on performance, inside a living room with closed windows, is presented in this paper. Sixteen 2-min sound sequences were created combining two variables: the number of events (four levels varying from one to four car pass-bys) and the peak emergence above the background noise (four levels with a 5 dB(A) step) keeping limited variations ofLAmax, 1s. The noise impact was evaluated through a reading task of texts synchronized with the sound sequences, for participants classified into fast or slow readers, and sensitive or non-sensitive to noise. The comprehension rate of the texts decreases as the background sound level increases. The reading speed decreases during the rising front of a peak, and goes back to its former regular reading speed during the descending front of the peak. This slowdown during the rising front reaches 14% for slow readers. The declared disturbance is higher for slow readers compared to fast readers, and higher for noise sensitive persons compared to non-sensitive persons. The influence of the acoustic indicators on the reading disturbance is very small compared to the influence of personal factors. There is even no influence of the number of events on this disturbance.

Serum Levels of Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor, Nerve Growth Factor, Neurotrophin 3, and Glial Derived Neurotrophic Factor in Children with Specific Learning Disorder

Specific learning disorder (SLD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that involves complex interactions of genetic, neurobiological and environmental factors, but the definite mechanisms remain mostly unknown. The possible role of neurotrophins has been implicated in the pathophysiology of various neurodevelopmental disorders. This study aimed to investigate whether serum levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), glial-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF), nerve growth factor (NGF), and neurotrophin-3 (NT-3) in children with SLD deviate from those of neurotypical brains. Forty-four patients with SLD and 44 healthy controls aged 7--12 years were included. SLD diagnosis and severity was determined using DSM-5-based interviews and SLD clinical observation battery. Serum neurotrophins were measured using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. BDNF (p=0.032), NGF (p=0.029), and NT-3 (p=0.025) serum levels were significantly higher in the SLD group compared to the control group; however, serum levels of GDNF did not show any significant difference between groups. On the other hand, GDNF serum levels were significantly different between mild and severe SLD groups (p=0.007) and were lower in severe SLD subjects than in mild cases. There was also a significant correlation between patients' reading speeds and serum levels of GDNF (p=0.025), and GDNF serum levels were lower in patients with slower reading speeds. These findings suggest that neurotrophins might play a role in the pathophysiology of SLD. Increased serum levels of BDNF, NGF, and NT-3 might reflect compensatory attempts at neuroprotection against neurodevelopmental impairment.

IDENTIFYING STUDENTS’ DIFFICULTIES IN READING COMPREHENSION AT SMA MUHAMMADIYAH 1 PALU THROUGH NARRATIVE TEXT

To find out the students’ difficulties in comprehending Narrative text at the tenth grade of SMA Muhammadiyah 1 Palu.. This research applied a qualitative research design. The subject of this research were All the students of tenth grade at SMA Muhammadiyah 1 Palu and English teacher of tenth grade at SMA Muhammadiyah 1 Palu. The techniques used to get the data were questionnaire and an Interview Question. As the final result found from the students’ questionnaire of their reading problem, based on the result of the identification, it was found that students of SMA Muhammadiyah 1 Palu had difficulties in vocabulary and organization of narrative text, inappropriate reading strategies, lack of motivation, students’ insufficient background knowledge in reading narrative and bad reading process which the most common problem experienced by the students during the reading process was keeping their concentration. The data also supported by the interview with the teacher. Based on the results of the interview with the teacher, the students have problems in reading comprehension. The students’ problems in reading comprehension are: lack of vocabulary, slow reading speed, lack of motivation, and boredom. In case of reading narrative text, the students showed the following problems that they have less comprehension in grammar, lack of competence to find out the main information and specific information in the reading passage, lack of prediction ability or guessing meaning ability as well as lack of background knowledge about the reading passage, specifically on the background story or unfamiliar characters in the story.

The phonetic realization of Russian pitch accents in contrastive questions and enumeration contexts

This paper presents the results of a phonetic experiment that compares the acoustic features of rising pitch configurations used in contrastive questions and on non-last elements of a list in enumeration contexts in Russian. 23 native Russian speakers were instructed to read aloud pairs of stimuli with similar segmental structure embedded in larger texts. Significant differences were found between the two syntactic context conditions. In enumeration contexts, both local minima and maxima associated with the prominent syllable had a significantly earlier and more stable alignment, and the slope of the rise between the tonal targets was steeper. In addition, the effect of the speech rate on these acoustic features was tested. The effects of fast and slow reading turned out to be asymmetric. In line with the segmental anchoring hypothesis, no significant effect of fast speech rate on alignment and pitch range was found; only the effect on slope was significant. Conversely, while reading the texts intentionally slowly the participants consistently used melodies with later alignment of local minima and maxima and larger pitch range. On the one hand, these data can be indicative of the interchangeability of stylistically marked pitch accent postulated for the incompleteness contexts in traditional descriptions of Russian intonation. On the other hand, this interpretation cannot account for the fact that the rightward shift in alignment in slow tempo was also found in the contrastive question condition.

La voz a ti debida, Miguel Alarcón

Remembrance is written with a capital letter when evoking a deceased colleague. With delicacy and mastery, the text explores the friend's skin and entrails. The slow reading involves you in the need to know the figure of the person, especially when it is said that, being generous, he was a friend of his friends... An invitation to remember him. A man with political convictions who was a militant in life and at the University. And to add that: "His geographer's soul led him to live intensely the spaces he inhabited".

Reading Specific Small Saccades Predict Individual Phonemic Awareness and Reading Speed.

Small fixational eye-movements are a fundamental aspect of vision and thought to reflect fine shifts in covert attention during active viewing. While the perceptual benefits of these small eye movements have been demonstrated during a wide range of experimental tasks including during free viewing, their function during reading remains surprisingly unclear. Previous research demonstrated that readers with increased microsaccade rates displayed longer reading speeds. To what extent increased fixational eye movements are, however, specific to reading and might be indicative of reading skill deficits remains, however, unknown. To address this topic, we compared the eye movement scan paths of 13 neurotypical individuals and 13 subjects diagnosed with developmental dyslexia during short story reading and free viewing of natural scenes. We found that during reading only, dyslexics tended to display small eye movements more frequently compared to neurotypicals, though this effect was not significant at the population level, as it could also occur in slow readers not diagnosed as dyslexics. In line with previous research, neurotypical readers had twice as many regressive compared to progressive microsaccades, which did not occur during free viewing. In contrast, dyslexics showed similar amounts of regressive and progressive small fixational eye movements during both reading and free viewing. We also found that participants with smaller fixational saccades from both neurotypical and dyslexic samples displayed reduced reading speeds and lower scores during independent tests of reading skill. Slower readers also displayed greater variability in the landing points and temporal occurrence of their fixational saccades. Both the rate and spatio-temporal variability of fixational saccades were associated with lower phonemic awareness scores. As none of the observed differences between dyslexics and neurotypical readers occurred during control experiments with free viewing, the reported effects appear to be directly related to reading. In summary, our results highlight the predictive value of small saccades for reading skill, but not necessarily for developmental dyslexia.

Review: Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production, by Anthony Reed

Review: <i>Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production</i>, by Anthony Reed

Dennis C. Rasmussen. The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship that Shaped Modern Thought.

Dennis C. Rasmussen. <i>The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship that Shaped Modern Thought</i>.

The poetic teaching space: Gaston Bachelard and a third realm in management education

ABSTRACT How to make students and teachers stop Stop and think and feel Reading slow Reading aloud Savouring silence Being there with all our emotions and bodies An experiment Not a social experiment Not a psychological experiment But a poetic Accompanied by a French philosopher Gaston Bachelard was always there in the atmosphere Our classroom practice With our master’s students In sustainable management We searched for poetic moments Turned into a conversation Turned into a paper A paper about the poetics of teaching Phenomenologizing philosophy Rupturing classrooms

The effects of increased dopamine-levels on attentional control during reading and reading comprehension

The aim of the present study was to gain insight into the neurobiological processes, particularly the dopaminergic processes, underlying attentional control during reading and reading comprehension. In order to test the effects of increased levels of dopamine (DA) in the brain, female university students (N = 80), half of them being carriers of the DRD4-7R allele and half of them not, participated in a double-blind placebo-controlled within-subjects experiment in which they were orally administered levodopa or a placebo before reading a text. After reading the text, participants reported on their attentional control during reading and completed comprehension questions. Pharmacologically increasing DA levels in the brain negatively influenced reading comprehension. This effect was moderate (ηp2 = .13). No interaction effects of condition and DRD4 genotype were found, for either attentional control or reading comprehension. Exploratory analyses showed that increased DA levels in the brain positively influenced fluctuations in attentional control, but only in a group of slow readers. No effects of increased DA were found for the two other attentional control measures used in the present study and no effects of increased DA on attentional control were found for fast readers. Results are discussed from the perspective of the inverted U-shape theory and the possible dopamine-related mechanisms.

Sans Forgetica is Not the “Font” of Knowledge: Disfluent Fonts are Not Always Desirable Difficulties

Subsequent recall is improved if students try to recall target material during study (self-testing) versus simply re-reading it. This effect is consistent with the notion of “desirable difficulties.” If the learning experience involves difficulties that induce extra effort, then retention may be improved. Not all difficulties are desirable, however. Difficult-to-read ( disfluent) typefaces yield inconsistent results. A new disfluent font, Sans Forgetica, was developed and alleged to promote deeper processing and improve learning. Although it would be invaluable if changing the font could enhance learning, the few studies on Sans Forgetica have been inconsistent, and focused on short retention intervals (0–5 minutes). We investigated a 1-week interval to increase practical relevance and because some benefits only manifest after a delay. A testing-effect manipulation was also included. Students ( N = 120) learned two passages via different methods (study then re-study vs. study then self-test). Half the students saw the passages in Times New Roman and half in Sans Forgetica. Recall test scores were higher for passages learned via self-testing than restudying, but the effect of font and the interaction were nonsignificant. We suggest that disfluency increases the local (orthographic) processing effort on each word but slowed reading might impair relational processing across words. In contrast, testing and generation effect manipulations often engage relational processing (question: answer; cue: target)—yielding subsequent benefits on cued-recall tests. We elaborate this suggestion to reconcile conflicting results across studies.

Reading Development, Word Length and Frequency Effects: An Eye-Tracking Study with Slow and Fast Readers

Research on reading development attempts to explain differences in the reading patterns of adults and children. Previous studies, which typically analyzed word length and frequency effects in developing readers, often focused on dyslexic or dysfluent readers. Similar to previous studies, we investigated the effects of word length and word frequency on the eye movements of children and added several novel aspects: We tested 66 typically developing German-speaking children. Children’s oral reading fluency was used as measure of reading ability. Only fast readers (n = 34, mean age 10.9 ± 0.9 years) and slow readers (n = 32, 11.2 ± 0.9 years) participated in an eye-tracking experiment and silently read an age-appropriate original narrative text from a children’s book. The analysis of silent reading of the entire text confirmed the earlier group classification. To analyze word length and frequency, we selected 40 nouns as target words in the text. We found significant effects of word length and word frequency for all children in the expected direction. For fast readers, we detected significant interactions of word length and frequency in first fixation duration, gaze duration, and total reading time. These revealed a frequency effect for long, but not short words. This suggests lexical whole-word processing with a fast activation of the word’s lexical entry for shorter words and an application of the nonlexical route of the dual route cascaded model (DRC) with a slower lexical access to whole word forms for long words. Slow readers demonstrated a strong sensitivity to word length, indicating a slower or delayed lexical access to orthographic word forms. Additionally, they exhibited weaker word frequency effects. These findings suggest a developmental view of reading in typically developing children in accordance with the DRC, with nonlexical serial decoding as the seemingly prominent reading strategy of slow readers and lexical whole-word recognition as the prominent reading strategy of fast readers.

Impact of Visual Discomfort Symptoms On SDMT Performance Among Persons With Multiple Sclerosis

<h3>Research Objectives</h3> To examine how visual discomfort symptoms affect performance on the symbol digit modalities test (SDMT), a visually mediated information processing speed task which is considered a gold standard measure for cognition in multiple sclerosis (MS) research. <h3>Design</h3> Observational, cross-sectional study. <h3>Setting</h3> General community. <h3>Participants</h3> Eighty-seven persons with MS and 30 healthy controls (HCs). <h3>Interventions</h3> Not applicable. <h3>Main Outcome Measures</h3> Visual discomfort questionnaire (VDQ) and SDMT. <h3>Results</h3> Persons with MS reported significantly more severe visual discomfort symptoms on the VDQ than HCs (W = 424, p < 0.001). More severe visual discomfort symptoms was significantly associated with worse SDMT performance (ρ = -0.24, p = 0.011). Specifically, reports of symptoms such as text moving or fading while reading (p = 0.038), blurriness and diplopia (p = 0.055), having to re-read texts (p = 0.076), and slow reading (p = 0.008) were significantly related to SDMT performance, while symptoms related to headache and eye soreness (p = 0.824) and glare (p = 0.961) were not linked to SDMT performance. <h3>Conclusions</h3> Visual discomfort symptoms may impact/interfere with SDMT performance in persons with MS. When determining information processing speed deficits using the SDMT, visual discomfort symptoms need to be considered. <h3>Author(s) Disclosures</h3> Authors declare no conflicts of interest.

End-to-end acoustic modelling for phone recognition of young readers

Automatic recognition systems for child speech are lagging behind those dedicated to adult speech in the race of performance. This phenomenon is due to the high acoustic and linguistic variability present in child speech caused by their body development, as well as the lack of available child speech data. Young readers’ speech additionally displays peculiarities, such as slow reading rate and presence of reading mistakes, that hardens the task. This work attempts to tackle the main challenges in phone acoustic modelling for young child speech with limited data and improve understanding of strengths and weaknesses of a wide selection of model architectures in this domain. We find that transfer learning techniques are highly efficient on end-to-end architectures for adult-to-child adaptation with a small amount of child speech data. Through transfer learning, a Transformer model complemented with a Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) objective function, reaches a phone error rate of 28.1%, outperforming a state-of-the-art DNN–HMM model by 6.6% relative, as well as other end-to-end architectures by more than 8.5% relative. An analysis of the models’ performance on two specific reading tasks (isolated words and sentences) is provided, showing the influence of the utterance length on attention-based and CTC-based models. The Transformer+CTC model displays an ability to better detect reading mistakes made by children, which can be attributed to the CTC objective function effectively constraining the attention mechanisms to be monotonic.

Palestinian EFL University Students’ Problems with the Reading Sections of the TOEFL Internet-based Test and the Revised TOEFL paper-delivered Test

Despite Palestinian university students’ problems with the Test of English as a Foreign Language Internet-based Test, no researchers approached this research area in the Palestinian English as a Foreign Language context. The present study attempted to answer a question focusing on Palestinian university students’ problems with the reading sections of the Test of English as a Foreign Language Internet-based Test and the revised Test of English as a Foreign Language paper-delivered test. The participants were 65 fourth-year students studying English at Al-Aqsa University. The researcher employed four instruments: a test, a group semi-structured interview, and two individual semi-structured interviews. Results showed the students’ problems with the reading sections of the two types of tests, such as the irrelevance of the topics of the tests to the students’ content background knowledge, students’ lack of exposure to lengthy passages, students’ slow reading speed, and the students’ lack of linguistic proficiency. Additionally, the study offered many recommendations for Educational Testing Service experts and Al-Aqsa university students and instructors.

Analisis Strategi Pembelajaran Alquran

As a guide for humans in managing their lives in order to obtain physical and spiritual happiness, in this world and in the hereafter. To be able to learn and understand the content or content of the Qur'an is not easy, therefore the teacher or cleric must have a strategy, method or method in teaching it. The methods commonly used in an effort to be able to read the Qur'an properly and correctly in many TPQ or TPA include the Jibril, Bagdadi, Qiro'ati method, the Iqro method and the An-Nahdhiyah method. Among the stages of learning the Qur'an is by reading, translating and interpreting. As we know the first commandment when the Qur'an was revealed to the prophet Muhammad was reading, which of course has a very broad understanding. Then in another verse Allah SWT commands us to read the Qur'an with Tartil. In Abdullah bin Ahmad an-Nasafi's view "tartil" is to clarify the reading of all hijaiyah letters, maintain places to stop reading (waqaf), and perfect harokat. in reading. Meanwhile, Sayyidina Ali bin Abi Talib equated "tartil" with tajwid, namely improving the reading of the letters and knowing the stopping places (waqaf). In contrast to Ibn Kathir who interprets "tartil" as a slow reading that can help towards the level of understanding and contemplation of the Qur'an. In line with Ibn Kathir, Fakhrur Rozy in his commentary said "tartil" is to clarify and perfect the reading of all letters by giving all their rights by not hastily in reading the Qur'an.

Gaming Under Biopolitical Sovereign Power

This article argues that a spatiotemporal approach to abjection in video games helps scholars understand how confronting the abject in gameplay maps onto biopolitical conditions of living and gaming under sovereign state power. By means of a slow reading of The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, this essay offers the chronotope of the abject as a flexible, interpretive tool to account for game narrative, mechanics, and iconography that map onto out-of-game lived realities. Drawing upon Kristeva’s psychoanalysis and Agamben’s philosophy of politics, I adapt Bakhtin’s chronotope of the threshold to the mutable video game medium in order to take up the threshold concepts of the abject, life/death, responsibility/ethics, and reading/writing presented in the game. Through the chronotope, I also reconsider this game’s critical response and relation to a Christian cosmology. Ultimately, the chronotope opens up a threshold space through which more just and equitable chronotopic relations might emerge.