L9 - Skilled reading

Question 1

What are the 3 stages of reading development (Frith, 1986; Ehri, 2005)?

Answer 1

1. Logographic:
   - Words recognised by idiosyncratic global features.
2. Alphabetic:
   - Letter-sound relationships learned; new words can be sounded out.
3. Orthographic:
   - Words recognised automatically from orthographic features.

Question 2

Why is automatic word identification important for reading comprehension?

Answer 2

i) Reading requires many simultaneous processes:
- access meaning of words.
- maintain meanings in memory.
- integrate meanings together.
- relate meanings to existing knowledge.

ii) Attentional resources are limited:
- attention must be divided between simultaneous tasks.
- if attention is overloaded, performance is poor.
- to limit attentional requirements we automate ‘low level tasks’.

iii) Automating a task requires:
- that the task is ‘invariant’.
- lots of practice.

Question 3

Does context change lexical access?

Answer 3

• Yes, words are identified more easily in context.
• Prior context facilitates identification of brief stimuli.
• Lexical decision faster to ‘nurse’ than ‘butter’ when preceded by ‘doctor’.

Question 4

What are the two ways which context could facilitate lexical access?

Answer 4

• Automatic spreading semantic activation in lexical/semantic memory.
• Attentional strategies, e.g. guessing, prediction.

Question 5

What is the two process model of Semantic Priming (Posner & Snyder, 1975)?

Answer 5

i) Automatic process:
- fast, obligatory, parallel.
- pre-activates related items with no cost to unrelated.
- > facilitation without interference.

ii) Attentional process:
- slow, attentional mediation, serial.
- > increased benefit for related items, as well as cost to unrelated.

Question 6

What did Stanovich (1986) demonstrate towards the relationship between contextual predictions and reading skill?

Answer 6

• Participants asked to read final word of a sentence aloud.

Predicable: “The banker locked the safe.”
Neutral: “They said it was in the hidden safe.”
Incongruent: “The train pulled into the hidden safe.”

• 4th & 6th graders show facilitation (predictable) as well as inhibition (incongruent).
• Adults show only small facilitation.

-> Reliance on contextual prediction reduces with reading skill.

Question 7

What did Stanovich and West (1983) demonstrate in skilled readers between degraded and normal text?

Answer 7

Facilitation for predictable completions; no inhibition for incongruous.
-> Priming effects reflect automatic processes.

Inhibition for incongruent completions only when stimuli are degraded.
-> Use active prediction when identification is difficult.

Question 8

Are both meanings of ambiguous words accessed even when context favours one?

Answer 8

Cross-modal priming (Swinney, 1979):
- Auditory: “… the man was not surprised when he saw several spiders, roaches and other bugs.”
- Visual Lexical decision: between ant, spy, sew.
Respond to both ‘ant’ and ‘spy’ -> context irrelevant meaning initially activated, then suppressed.

Question 9

What are some factors which the degree of activation of context-irrelevant meanings depend on?

Answer 9

• Homograph dominance (same spelling, different meaning).
• Degree of context bias.
• Reading skill.

Question 10

What is the difference between skill levels of comprehension with lexical ambiguities?

Answer 10

• Better comprehenders are quicker to use sentence context to suppress irrelevant meanings.
• Word identification is automatic and the effects of context come in later.

Question 11

What is the Dual Route Model of word recognition?

Answer 11

• Basic premise: need two routes to explain 1) exception words (e.g. colonel, pint); 2) nonwords (e.g. slint).
• Grapheme/phoneme correspondence (GPC) ‘rules’ predict regular pronunciation of non-words.
• Systems operate in parallel to determine response.

Question 12

What is some evidence towards the Dual Route Model?

Answer 12

Regularity x frequency interaction:

• Irregular, low frequency words take longer.
• > because grapheme-phoneme system conflict.

Acquired dyslexics:

i) Phonological dyslexics:
- words > non-words.
- lexical route intact, damaged GPC.
- can’t pronoun non-words, can pronounce irregular words.
ii) Surface dyslexics:
- non-words > words.
- GPC route intact, lexical route damaged.
- errors on irregular words.

• > Double dissociation.
• > Independent systems.

Question 13

Outline the Interactive Activation Model:

Answer 13

• Connectionist model with ‘symbolic’ nodes for letters, words.
• Hierarchical layer arrangement of nodes.
• Parallel interactive activation and inhibition.
• Identification occurs when threshold is reached in a node.
• Lateral inhibition within levels (competition for best matching word).

Question 14

What are the 3 ‘Benchmark Phenomena’ in IA Model?

Answer 14

1) Word frequency effects:
- identification threshold lower for common words.
2) Word superiority effects:
- letters in words receive top-down support from word nodes.
3) Semantic priming:
- active word nodes activate their semantic features at concept levels.
- top-down effects from the concept level -> activates likely upcoming words which pre-activates the representations at the word level.

Question 15

Outline the Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) Model aka Triangle Model?

Answer 15

• Connectionist model.
• Set of interconnected processing nodes.
• Learning algorithms (e.g. delta rule, back propagation).
• Multi-level architecture (“hidden units”).
• Extract statistical regularities between orthography, phonology, semantics.

Question 16

Why is the Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) Model advantageous over other models?

Answer 16

• PDP model provides an explanation of how knowledge is acquired (error correction learning) which lacks in Dual Route and IA models.
• “Regularity effects” due to inconsistent O-P associations, as in IA model, not seperate systems (Dual Route).
• All knowledge represented in associative networks NOT discrete rules.