James R. Booth

Quick, Automatic, and General Activation of Orthographic and Phonological Representations in Young Readers.

Second through 6th graders were presented with nonword primes (orthographic, pseudohomophone, and control) and target words displayed for durations (30 and 60 ms) that were brief enough to prevent complete processing. Word reading skills were assessed by 3 word and nonword naming tasks. Good readers exhibited more orthographic priming than poor readers at both durations and more pseudohomophone priming at the short duration only. This suggests that good readers activate letter and phonemic information more efficiently than poor readers. Good readers also exhibited an equal amount of priming at both durations, whereas poor readers showed greater priming at the longer duration. This suggests that activation was not under strategic control. Finally, priming was reliable for both high- and low-frequency targets. This suggests that readers activate consistent information regardless of target word characteristics. Thus, quick, automatic, and general activation of orthographic and phonological information in skilled readers results from the precision and redundancy of their lexical representations.

Reading unspaced text : implications for theories of reading eye movements

According to current theories of reading, the readers saccades are guided primarily by spaces between words, clearly the most prominent visual feature in most modern texts. This belief was investigated by recording eye movements with unprecedented accuracy and precision while subjects read spaced and unspaced passages both silently and aloud. Modest increases in fixation durations and decreases in overall reading speed were observed when unspaced texts were read. However, subjects read unspaced texts with the same level of comprehension and percentage of regressions as they read spaced texts. The only global eye movement parameter that changed appreciably when spaces were removed was progressive (rightward) saccade length. Progressive saccades were shorter in unspaced texts. However, unspaced texts were denser and narrower because they were constructed so as to contain the same number of words/line as the spaced texts. This meant that unspaced texts contained more informational characters/degree of visual angle. The observed decrease in progressive saccade lengh tended to be proportional to this increase in text density. Therefore, the number of saccades/line of text remained approximately the same in both spaced and unspaced texts. Furthermore, a detailed examination of local eye movement properties, i.e. where within words the subjects fixated and how many times they fixated words of different lengths, suggested that the same oculomotor strategy was used for reading spaced and unspaced texts. This was true for both silent reading and reading aloud. Thus, a model that could explain reading spaced texts could also explain reading unspaced texts with only a change of a single global parameter, namely, saccade length. We conclude that the current tendency to emphasize spaces as guides to reading eye movements must be reconsidered. Words, not spaces, may serve as the perceptual units that guide the line of sight through the text.

Fillers and spaces in text: The importance of word recognition during reading

Current theories of reading eye movements claim that reading saccades are programmed primarily on the basis of information about the length of the upcoming word, determined by low-level visual processes that detect spaces to the right of fixation. Many studies attempted to test this claim by filling spaces between words with various non-space symbols (fillers). This manipulation, however, confounds the effect of inserting extraneous characters into text with the effect of obscuring word boundaries by filling spaces. We performed the control conditions necessary to unconfound these effects. Skilled readers read continuous stories aloud and silently. Three factors were varied: (i) position of the fillers in the text (at the beginning, the end, or surrounding each word); (ii) the presence or absence of spaces in the text; and (iii) the effect of the type of filler on word recognition (from greatest effect to least effect: Latin letters, Greek letters, digits and shaded boxes). The effect of fillers on reading depended more on the type of filler than on the presence of spaces. The greater effect the fillers had on word recognition, the more they showed reading. Surrounding each word with digits or Greek letters slowed reading as much as filling spaces with these symbols. Surrounding each word with randomly chosen letters, while preserving spaces, slowed reading by 44-75%--as much as, or more than, removing spaces from normal text. Removing spaces from text with Latin-letter fillers slowed reading by only 10-20% more. We conclude that fillers in text disrupt reading by affecting word recognition directly, without necessarily affecting the eye movement pattern.

Acquisition of the Mental State Verb Know by 2- to 5-Year-Old Children

The production of the cognitive internal state word know by four 2- to 5-year-old children and their parents was examined. The levels of meaning of cognitive words can be categorized hierarchically along the dimensions of conceptual difficulty and abstractness (see Booth & Hall, 1995). The present study found that children and their parents expressed low levels of meaning less frequently, whereas they expressed high levels of meaning more frequently as a function of age. The childrens use of know was also correlated positively with (1) their number of different words produced suggesting that cognitive words are related to more general semantic processes, and (2) with parental use of those same cognitive words suggesting that parental linguistic input may be an important mechanism in cognitive word acquisition. Finally, young children tended to use know more to refer to themselves than to refer to others, whereas their parents tended to use know equally to refer to self and others. The importance of cognitive words in a theory of language acquisition is discussed.

Role of the cognitive internal state lexicon in reading comprehension

Cognitive internal state words (e.g., think and know) may be central to accessing, monitoring, and transforming our internal states, processes that seem to be critical for high-level text understanding (e.g., E. K. Scholnick & W. S. Hall, 1991). Fifth graders, 10th graders, and college undergraduates participated in this study of the importance of cognitive words in skilled reading comprehension. Positive correlations with cognitive word knowledge were significantly higher for verbal (vocabulary and reading comprehension) than for quantitative achievement percentiles. The order of acquisition of cognitive words depended on a complex interaction among frequency of the replacement cognitive word in established word frequency counts, the level of meaning as determined by the R. E. Frank and W. S. Hall (1991) conceptual difficulty hierarchy and whether the cognitive word was a cognate of think or know

Much ado about nothing: the place of space in text

Abstract We reply to the critique of Epelboim, Booth and Steinman (1994, Vision Research, 34 , 1735–1766) by Rayner and Pollatsek (1996, Vision Research, 36 , 461–465). We show that they are wrong in all respects. Word recognition, rather than spaces, guides reading eye movements.

Development of the understanding of the polysemous meanings of the mental-state verb know

Abstract This study investigated childrens understanding (3-, 6-, 9-, and 12-year-olds) of the different levels of meaning of the cognitive verb know as defined by the Hall, Scholnick, and Hughes (1987) abstractness and conceptual difficulty hierarchy. We found that cognitive verb knowledge increased with development and that certain low levels of meaning were mastered before certain high levels of meaning irrespective of the medium of presentation: video-taped “skits” and audio-taped “stories.” However, children developed an understanding of low levels of meaning at a more rapid rate than high levels of meaning. This resulted in a more differentiated and hierarchical cognitiveverb knowledge in older children. Finally, we found that the audio-taped stories were more difficult than the video-taped skits, and that both tasks were significantly correlated with a standardized vocabulary measure for all ages except the 3-year-olds. The implications of this study and others for a model of the cognitive-verb lexicon are discussed.