Mads Poulsen

What's in a Name Depends on the Type of Name: The Relationships Between Semantic and Phonological Access, Reading Fluency, and Reading Comprehension

The present study investigated the relationships between lexical access, reading fluency, and comprehension. Two components of speed of lexical access were studied: phonological and semantic. Previous studies have mainly investigated these components of lexical access separately. The present study examined both components in naming tasks—with isolated letters (phonological) and pictures (semantic). Seventy-five Grade 5 students were administered measures of letter and picture naming speed, word and nonword reading fluency, and reading comprehension, together with control measures of vocabulary. The results showed that letter naming was a unique predictor of word reading fluency, whereas picture naming was not. Conversely, picture naming speed contributed unique variance to reading comprehension, whereas letter naming did not. The results indicate that phonological and semantic lexical access speed are separable components that are important for different reading subskills.

Context Improves Comprehension of Fronted Objects

Object-initial clauses (OCs) are associated with more processing difficulties than subject-initial clauses (SCs) in a number of languages (e.g. English, German and Finnish), but a supportive context can reduce or neutralize the difference between SCs and OCs with respect to reading times. Still, it is unresolved how context can affect the comprehension of OCs. In the present self-paced reading study of Danish, we therefore investigated both reading times, comprehension accuracy and response times for OCs and SCs. In line with previous studies on word order processing, OCs in an unsupportive context showed longer reading times than SCs, longer response times and a comprehension accuracy as poor as chance level. A manipulation of context showed no effect of reading time, but a supportive context had a stronger facilitating effect on comprehension (response accuracy and response time) for OCs than for SCs.

Acceptability and processing of long-distance dependencies in Danish

Long-distance dependencies have been the object of much theoretical interest in the Scandinavian languages and in general, but the empirical foundation for theorizing has been limited. The present paper investigates extraction from complement and adverbial clauses in Danish using acceptability judgment and reading-time measures. Extraction from adverbial clauses was found to be rated near the bottom of the scale and to be associated with a processing cost. This was also true of extraction in adverbial clauses in semantically cohesive sentences, which Jensen (2001a, b) has suggested is acceptable. It is concluded that under the conditions investigated extraction from adverbial clauses in Danish is associated with a processing cost and very low acceptability ratings, despite semantic cohesion.

Do dyslexics have auditory input processing difficulties

Word production difficulties are well documented in dyslexia, whereas the results are mixed for receptive phonological processing. This asymmetry raises the possibility that the core phonological deficit of dyslexia is restricted to output processing stages. The present study investigated whether a group of dyslexics had word level receptive difficulties using an auditory lexical decision task with long words and nonsense words. The dyslexics were slower and less accurate than chronological age controls in an auditory lexical decision task, with disproportionate low performance on nonsense words. The finding suggests that input processing difficulties are associated with the phonological deficit, but that these difficulties may be stronger above the level of phoneme perception.

Early Identification of Reading Difficulties: A Screening Strategy that Adjusts the Sensitivity to the Level of Prediction Accuracy

Early screening for reading difficulties before the onset of instruction is desirable because it allows intervention that is targeted at prevention rather than remediation of reading difficulties. However, early screening may be too inaccurate to effectively allocate resources to those who need them. The present study compared the accuracy of early screening before the onset of formal reading instruction with late screening six months into the first year of instruction. The study followed 164 Danish students from the end of Grade 0 to the end of Grade 2. Early screening included measures of phonemic awareness, rapid naming, letter knowledge, paired associate learning, and reading. Late screening included only reading. Results indicated that reading measures improved substantially as predictors over the first six months of Grade 1, to the point where late reading measures alone provided as much information as the early measures combined. In the light of these results and a less than perfect early screening accuracy, a new strategy for screening is introduced and discussed. The strategy proposes multi-point screening with gradually increasing sensitivity to strike a balance between manageable screening procedures and outcomes and early identification of students who are most likely in need of extra resources. Copyright

A restricted test of single-word intelligibility in 3-year-old children with and without cleft palate.

Objective In a previous study, children with cleft palate with hard palate closure at 12 months of age showed more typical phonological development than did children with an unrepaired hard palate at 36 months of age. This finding was based on narrow transcription of word initial target consonants obtained from a simple naming test. To evaluate the relevance of this finding, we investigated how well the childrens target words were understood by 84 naive listeners. Design A cross-sectional study. Participants Data obtained from 28 children with unilateral cleft lip and palate, 3 years of age, who received hard palate closure at either 12 months (hard palate repaired; HPR) or 36 months (hard palate unrepaired; HPU) were compared with data obtained from 14 age-matched, typically developing control children. Methods Video recordings of the children naming target words were shown to 84 naive listeners between 15 and 24 years of age who typed the word they heard. Results The findings of this study indicated that naive listeners correctly identified a larger percentage of words in the control children followed by children in the HPR group. Children in the HPU group were more difficult for the naive listeners to understand. The error of retraction/backing of alveolar target consonants to velar place of articulation occurred frequently and most often in the HPU group and was found to have a negative effect on intelligibility.

Who Did What to Whom? The Relationship Between Syntactic Aspects of Sentence Comprehension and Text Comprehension

ABSTRACT This study investigated the relationship between syntactic comprehension at the sentence level and text-level comprehension. The study isolated the specific contribution of syntax by asking whether sentence comprehension efficiency of difficult syntactic constructions explained variance in text comprehension after controlling for sentence comprehension efficiency of basic constructions with similar semantic complexity. Seventy-three Grade 5 students completed assessments of text comprehension; basic and difficult written sentence comprehension efficiency; and control measures of decoding fluency, vocabulary, and verbal memory. Efficiency measures were used to assess individual differences in basic sentence comprehension with accuracy near ceiling. Difficult sentence comprehension efficiency explained 6% unique variance in text comprehension after controlling for basic sentence comprehension efficiency and other controls. Thus, the results show that individual differences in the ability to establish sentence meaning from syntactic information are related to text comprehension.

The short- and long-term predictions of reading accuracy and speed from paired-associate learning

Cross-sectional studies have established that performance on paired-associate learning (PAL) tasks is associated with reading performance. There are good reasons to expect such a relationship because learning to read involves learning the sounds of individual letters and possibly also sounds of strings of letters (e.g., spelling patterns). However, results from longitudinal studies have been mixed. A closer look at these studies suggests that PAL may be related to development of accuracy rather than speed in reading. This suggestion was investigated directly in the current longitudinal study. The study followed 137 students from Grade 0 (kindergarten) to Grade 5. In Grade 0, they completed measures of PAL, letter knowledge, phoneme awareness, and rapid automatized naming (RAN). In Grades 1 and 5, decoding accuracy was measured with the addition of decoding speed in Grade 5. PAL in Grade 0 was found to be a unique predictor of decoding accuracy in Grades 1 and 5 after controlling for Grade 0 letter knowledge, phoneme awareness, and RAN. PAL in Grade 0 even contributed to Grade 5 decoding accuracy after also controlling for Grade 1 decoding. Zero-order correlations between PAL and Grade 5 decoding speed were nonsignificant and close to zero. The results indicate that PAL measures a trait that may influence reading development over a substantial amount of time. Possible roles of PAL in decoding development over time are discussed, for example, how verbal learning may be a core component in the acquisition of associations between letter patterns (spelling patterns) and their pronunciation.

The usefulness of the grammaticality–acceptability distinction in functional approaches to language

The distinction between grammaticality and acceptability has been regarded with strong scepticism in functional linguistics because of its origin in Chomskyan linguistics. In this article, I will argue that the distinction is useful in functional linguistics, provided that it is based on a distinction between competence and performance, rather than on a distinction between syntax and meaning. The basic rationale for having such a distinction is that much of linguistics is concerned with describing relatively stable grammatical knowledge, rather than the psycholinguistic dynamics of language use. This article will briefly summarize the early history and rationale of the notion of grammaticality within Chomskyan and functional linguistics, before defining a functional, usage-based definition of grammaticality. Finally, the article will illustrate how this usage-based notion of grammaticality can be used as a framework for interpreting corpus and experimental data on language use.