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2022 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sietske van Viersen ◽  
Athanassios Protopapas ◽  
Peter F. de Jong

In this study, we investigated how word- and text-level processes contribute to different types of reading fluency measures. We aimed to increase our understanding of the underlying processes necessary for fluent reading. The sample included 73 Dutch Grade 3 children, who were assessed on serial word reading rate (familiar words), word-list reading fluency (increasingly difficult words), and sentence reading fluency. Word-level processes were individual word recognition speed (discrete word reading) and sequential processing efficiency (serial digit naming). Text-level processes were receptive vocabulary and syntactic skills. The results showed that word- and text-level processes combined accounted for a comparable amount of variance in all fluency outcomes. Both word-level processes were moderate predictors of all fluency outcomes. However, vocabulary only moderately predicted sentence reading fluency, and syntactic skills merely contributed to sentence reading fluency indirectly through vocabulary. The findings indicate that sequential processing efficiency has a crucial role in reading fluency across various measures besides individual word recognition speed. Additionally, text-level processes come into play when complexity and context availability of fluency measures increases, but the exact timing requires further study. Findings are discussed in terms of future directions and their possible value for diagnostic assessment and intervention of reading difficulties.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Chesters ◽  
Riikka Möttönen ◽  
Kate E Watkins

In a randomised controlled trial, we showed that a five-day intervention combining anodal transcranial direct current stimulation over the left inferior frontal cortex with temporary speech fluency enhancing techniques reduces stuttering. Speech fluency was unchanged by the fluency training alone, as predicted. Here, we report the neural changes associated with the intervention, measured using functional MRI during sentence reading before the training and one-week later. We obtained imaging data in 25 adult men who stutter (median age = 32 y, inter-quartile range = 11) at the pre-intervention baseline and again one-week post-intervention. A control group of 15 adult men who do not stutter (median age = 30 y, inter-quartile range = 10) and did not complete the intervention were scanned on one occasion. In a whole-brain analysis of perceptibly fluent sentence reading, we compared the change in task-evoked neural activity in the sub-group of men who stutter who had received active stimulation during the intervention (N=13) with those who had sham stimulation (N=12). We hypothesised that the combination of anodal stimulation over the left inferior frontal cortex and fluency-enhancing training would result in lasting change to the brain networks supporting fluent speech production. An additional region-of-interest analysis explored effects on basal ganglia nuclei, which are thought to have a key role in the casual mechanism of stuttering, and which we hypothesised would be engaged by the behavioural approach used during training (choral and metronome-timed speaking). One week after the intervention, the group who had received active transcranial stimulation showed increased activity in speech-related brain regions, relative to the group who had received sham stimulation. Cortically, these changes were evident in left inferior frontal cortex (pars opercularis and orbitalis), anterior insula, anterior superior temporal gyrus, anterior cingulate cortex, and supplementary motor area. Subcortically, activation increased in the caudate nuclei and putamen bilaterally, and in right globus pallidus and thalamus. Together these regions form cortico-striatal-thalamo-cortical loops involved in the planning and initiation and control of speech movements.Our findings reveal that the mechanism of action of the tDCS intervention involved increasing activity across the network involved in the production of fluent speech, indicating that tDCS can be used to promote neural plasticity to strengthen networks supporting natural fluency. This study advances the potential of using non-invasive brain stimulation to improve therapy efficacy for those people who stutter who choose to work on increasing fluency.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Sungyoon Lee ◽  
Steven Woltering ◽  
Christopher Prickett ◽  
Qinxin Shi ◽  
Huilin Sun ◽  
...  

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (11) ◽  
pp. e0260540
Author(s):  
Alessandra Brusa ◽  
Antonia Pesič ◽  
Alice Mado Proverbio

The present study used EEG/ERPs to detect the activation of implicit stereotypical representations associated to other-race (OR) people and the modulation of such activation through the previous presentation of positive vs. neutral social information. Electrophysiological signals were recorded in 40 Italian Caucasian participants, unaware of the overall study’s purpose. They were presented with 285 sentences that could either violate, non-violate (e.g., “the Roma girl was involved in a robbery) or be neutral with regard to stereotypical concepts concerning other-race people (e.g. Asians, Africans, Arabic). ERPs were time-locked to the terminal words. Prior to the sentence reading task, participants were exposed to a 10 minutes colourful video documentary. While the experimental group was presented a video containing images picturing other-race characters involved in “prestigious” activities that violated stereotypical negative assumptions (e.g. a black neurosurgeon leading a surgery team), the control group viewed a neutral documentary about flora and fauna. EEG signals were then recorded during the sentence reading task to explore whether the previous exposure to the experimental video could modulate the detection of incongruence in the sentences violating stereotypes, as marked by the N400 response. A fictitious task was adopted, consisted in detecting rare animal names. Indeed, only the control group showed a greater N400 response (350–550 ms) to words incongruent with ethnic stereotypes compared to congruent and neutral ones, thus suggesting the presence of a racial bias. No N400 response was found for the experimental group, suggesting a lack of negative expectation for OR individuals. The swLORETA inverse solution, performed on the prejudice-related N400 showed that the Inferior Temporal and the Superior and Middle Frontal Gyri were the strongest N400 intra-cortical sources. Regardless of the experimental manipulation, Congruent terminal words evoked a greater P300 response (500–600 ms) compared to incongruent and neutral ones and a late frontal positivity (650–800 ms) was found to be larger to sentences involving OR than own-race characters (either congruent or incongruent with the prejudice) thus possibly indicating bias-free perceptual in-group/out-group categorization processes. The data showed how it is possible to modulate a pre-existing racial prejudice (as reflected by N400 effect) through exposure to positive media-driven information about OR people. Further follow-up studies should determine the duration in time, and across contexts, of this modulatory effect.


2021 ◽  
pp. 174702182110645
Author(s):  
Fengjiao Cong ◽  
Baoguo Chen

We conducted three eye movement experiments to investigate the mechanism for coding letter positions in a person’s second language during sentence reading; we also examined the role of morphology in this process with more rigorous manipulation. Given that readers not only obtain information from currently fixated words (i.e., the foveal area) but also from upcoming words (i.e., the parafoveal area) to guide their reading, we examined both when the targets were fixated (Exp. 1) and when the targets were seen parafoveally (Exp. 2 and Exp. 3). First, we found the classic transposed letter (TL) effect in Exp. 1, but not in Exp. 2 or Exp. 3. This implies that flexible letter position coding exists during sentence reading. However, this was limited to words located in the foveal area, suggesting that L2 readers whose L2 proficiency is not as high as skilled native readers are not able to extract and utilize the parafoveal letter identity and position information of a word, whether the word length is long (Exp. 2) or short (Exp. 3). Second, we found morphological information to influence the magnitude of the TL effect in Exp. 1. These results provide new eye movement evidence for the flexibility of L2 letter position coding during sentence reading, as well as the interactions between the different internal representations of words in this process. Altogether, this is helpful for understanding L2 sentence reading and visual word recognition. Thus, future L2 reading frameworks should integrate word recognition and eye movement control models.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gaisha Oralova ◽  
Victor Kuperman

Given that Chinese writing conventions lack inter-word spacing, understanding whether and how readers of Chinese segment regular unspaced Chinese writing into words is an important question for theories of reading. This study examined the processing outcomes of introducing spaces to written Chinese sentences in varying positions based on native speaker consensus. The measure of consensus for every character transition in our stimuli sentences was the percent of raters who placed a word boundary in that position. The eye movements of native readers of Chinese were recorded while they silently read original unspaced sentences and their experimentally manipulated counterparts for comprehension. We introduced two types of spaced sentences: one with spaces inserted at every probable word boundary (heavily spaced), and another with spaces placed only at highly probable word boundaries (lightly spaced). Linear mixed-effects regression models showed that heavily spaced sentences took identical time to read as unspaced ones despite the shortened fixation times on individual words (Experiment 1). On the other hand, reading times for lightly spaced sentences and words were shorter than those for unspaced ones (Experiment 2). Thus, spaces proved to be advantageous but only when introduced at highly probable word boundaries. We discuss methodological and theoretical implications of these findings.


Author(s):  
Madelon van den Boer ◽  
Maaike H. T. Zeguers

Abstract To capture the complexity of foreign language literacy acquisition, we investigated cognitive skills underlying word reading, sentence reading, word vocabulary and sentence vocabulary in three different foreign languages. Students fluent in Dutch simultaneously acquired three foreign languages that differed in orthographic transparency and writing system (Spanish, French, Chinese). Cognitive skills at the start of literacy acquisition (Grade 7) were longitudinally related to literacy attainment in each of the foreign languages after two years of instruction (end of Grade 8). Structural equation regression models indicated that three areas (word and sentence vocabulary, and sentence reading) related most strongly to verbal and nonverbal intelligence, indicating the involvement of academic skills. For word reading the influence of cognitive skills appeared language specific. Across languages, native reading skills seemed to be employed to varying degrees of efficiency to decipher foreign words, more so for foreign languages with a smaller orthographic distance from the native language.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Veldre ◽  
Roslyn Wong ◽  
Sally Andrews

Normative aging is accompanied by visual and cognitive changes that impact the systems that are critical for fluent reading. The patterns of eye movements during reading displayed by older adults have been characterized as demonstrating a trade-off between longer forward saccades and more word skipping versus higher rates of regressions back to previously read text. This pattern is assumed to reflect older readers’ reliance on top-down contextual information to compensate for reduced uptake of parafoveal information from yet-to-be fixated words. However, the empirical evidence for these assumptions is equivocal. This study investigated the depth of older readers’ parafoveal processing as indexed by sensitivity to the contextual plausibility of parafoveal words in both neutral and highly constraining sentence contexts. The eye movements of 65 cognitively intact older adults (61-87 years) were compared with data previously collected from young adults in two sentence reading experiments in which critical target words were replaced by valid, plausible, related, or implausible previews until the reader fixated on the target word location. Older and younger adults showed equivalent plausibility preview benefits on first-pass reading measures of both predictable and unpredictable words. However, older readers did not show the benefit of preview orthographic relatedness that was observed in young adults, and showed significantly attenuated preview validity effects. Taken together, the data suggest that older readers are specifically impaired in the integration of parafoveal and foveal information but do not show deficits in the depth of parafoveal processing. The implications for understanding the effects of aging on reading are discussed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 106-112
Author(s):  
Dina M Hubag ◽  
Eunice F. Elona ◽  
Mart Juffer M. Felisilda

This study aims to determine the effectiveness of Project “Parents Facilitates Reading at Home” (PFRATH) to the reading performance of Grade One Pupils of Tuban Elementary School, Santa Cruz South District in Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE). The respondents of this study were the forty-six (46) Grade One Pupils whose reading proficiency was categorized as Non-decoder, Beginning and Developing level based on Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) results conducted last February, 2021. This action research is a quantitative study that employed single group experimental research design using EGRA as an Assessment Tool. The researchers analyzed the data obtained in the Pre-Test and Post-Test in terms of Decoding Skill and Sentence Reading Skill of the respondents. Then, t-test was used to compare the results of tests through employing Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software application. The result shows that there is a significant difference between the pre-test and post test scores of the Decoding Skill and Sentence Reading Skill as evidenced by the calculated t-value and p-value. Therefore, Project PFRATH is found to be effective in improving the reading performance of the Grade One pupils. Based on the findings, the researchers made the following recommendations. The school may adopt the Project PFRATH to intensify its Reading Program. Teachers from other grade levels may utilize the Project PFRATH as reading intervention to help pupils improve their reading skill. For future researchers, a similar study on Project PFRATH may be conducted in DepEd Schools.


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