Betty Ann Levy

Relations among Musical Skills, Phonological Processing, and Early Reading Ability in Preschool Children.

We examined the relations among phonological awareness, music perception skills, and early reading skills in a population of 100 4- and 5-year-old children. Music skills were found to correlate significantly with both phonological awareness and reading development. Regression analyses indicated that music perception skills contributed unique variance in predicting reading ability, even when variance due to phonological awareness and other cognitive abilities (math, digit span, and vocabulary) had been accounted for. Thus, music perception appears to tap auditory mechanisms related to reading that only partially overlap with those related to phonological awareness, suggesting that both linguistic and nonlinguistic general auditory mechanisms are involved in reading.

Transfer from Word Training to Reading in Context: Gains in Reading Fluency and Comprehension

This article reports two studies that examined the relationship between word identification speed and story reading fluency, as indicated by speed and accuracy as well as comprehension. Poor readers in grade 4 were trained to read a set of single words and were then asked to repeatedly read stories that contained the trained words or stories with words not included in the training set. Benefits to text reading from single-word practice were observed, even for children who were particularly slow namers. The results are related to theoretical links between fluency and comprehension and to theories of developmental deficits.

The role of phonology in the activation of word meanings during reading: evidence from proofreading and eye movements

Six experiments explored the role of phonology in the activation of word meanings when words were embedded in meaningful texts. Specifically, the studies examined whether participants detected the substitution of a homophone mate for a contextually appropriate homophone. The frequency of the incorrect homophone, the frequency of the correct homophone, and the predictability of the correct homophone were manipulated. Also, the impact of reading skill was examined. When correct homophones were not predictable and participants had a range of reading abilities, the evidence indicated that phonology plays a role in activating the meanings of low-frequency words only. When the performance of good and poor readers was examined separately, the evidence indicated that good readers primarily activate the meanings of words using the direct route, whereas poor readers primarily activate the meanings of words using the phonological route.

Reading: Speech and meaning processes*

The present research investigates the role of speech recoding, particularly its relationship to meaning analysis during reading. Experiment I documents a speech processing conflict during reading that is not evident in an analogous listening task. Experiment II presents evidence against a simple divided attention explanation of this conflict effect. Experiment III demonstrates independent contributions of speech and meaning processes to memory for the passages just read. The results are related to three classes of reading models: top-down, bottom-up, and interactive processing views.

Vocalization and Suppression Effects in Sentence Memory.

Considerable debate surrounds the question of whether phonemic or auditory processing is beneficial during reading. The present research tested the generality of two short-term memory phenomena, taken to indicate the presence of auditory processing, to the sentence memory case. Experiment I demonstrated that sentences were better remembered following auditory than visual presentation. Also, suppressing vocal activity by asking subjects to count while reading led to a decrement in the retention of sentence wording and meaning. Experiment II ruled out a general interference explanation of the visual suppression effect and Experiment III extended the finding to memory for thematically related sentence sets. The results were discussed in terms of the relationship between speech and comprehension processes for meaningful material.

Proofreading familiar text: Constraints on visual processing

Recent emphasis on the interactive nature of processing during reading has focused attention on how higher level syntactic-semantic processes might constrain or alter the processing of letters and words during reading. The present studies addressed this question by examining the effect of prior knowledge about a passage on the subsequent ability to see visual errors when rereading the same text. Experiment 1 demonstrated that prior knowledge of a passage leads to better proofreading of that passage. Experiment 2 showed that this facilitation is at the level of visual letter and word analyses, not through higher level constraints on rereading. The data are discussed in terms of skilled visual pattern analyses and in terms of the redistribution of processing resources.

Episodic transfer and automaticity: Integration of data-driven and conceptually-driven processing in rereading.

We propose that data-driven and conceptually-driven processing become integrated to form an episodic representation that mediates transfer to later reading and memory tasks. These experiments explored conditions that produce visual script specificity for episodic transfer

Processing changes across reading encounters

Five experiments examined changes in the processing of a text across reading encounters. Experiment 1 showed that reading speed increased systematically across encounters, with no loss in the extensiveness of analyses of the printed text, as indicated by the ability to detect nonword errors embedded within that passage. Experiment 2 replicated this improved reading fluency with experience and showed that it occurred even with typescript changes across trials, thus indicating that a primed visual operations explanation cannot account for the effect. The third and fourth experiments then extended the study of the familiarity effect to higher level processing, as indicated by the detection of word errors. Familiarity facilitated the detection of these violations at the syntactic-semantic levels. Finally, Experiment 5 showed that these higher level violations continued to be well detected over a series of reading encounters with the same text. The results indicate that prior experience improves reading speed, with no attenuation of analysis of the printed words or of the passages message.

Proofreading familiar text: Allocating resources to perceptual and conceptual processes

Levy (1983) demonstrated that more spelling errors were detected, within a limited time period, when familiar passages were proofread than when unfamiliar passages were proofread. In the present series, Experiment 1 eliminated a possible confound in the Levy (1983) studies and showed that errors were detected both faster and more accurately in familiar texts. Experiment 2 demonstrated higher order involvement in the proofreading transfer effect, suggesting that a strictly word-level account was insufficient. Experiment 3 explored the proofreader’s sensitivity to the semantic properties of the proofreading passage, showing that the familiarity effect resulted from more efficient processing, not from lack of either visual or semantic analyses. The results are more consistent with a resource-allocation explanation than with either a visual-scanning or a skilled-visual-processing account.

Fluent rereading: Repetition, automaticity, and discrepancy.

Six experiments examined readerssensitivity to discrepancies introduced into familiar texts. Across 4 or 5 trials, Ss crossed out misspellings as they read. Reading times decreased across repeated readings, and even though misspellings differed on every reading, their detection remained constant or improved across readings. Thus reading became fluent but remained accurate across experiences. On the final reading small discrepancies were unexpectedly introduced into the familiar texts. Results showed clear sensitivity to discrepancies in visual features (Experiments 1, 2, and 5) and in lexical and semantic characteristics (Experiments 3, 4, and 6) of familiar texts. Experiments 5 and 6 showed that this sensivity was on-line, occuring in the interval in which the discrepancy was encountered