Reading and language comprehension requires the ability to identify relationships between linguistic units that are frequently non-adjacent. This means that comprehenders must be able to store partially interpreted material (e.g., the subject of a sentence whose verb occurs much later, viz. The boy with the coat with the blue stripes and the flashy buttons on the collar that he bought on sale last Tuesday sang at the bus stop.) A frequent explanation for comprehension difficulty is that individuals differ on the amount of Working Memory (WM) capacity they can devote to maintaining this information. Yet recent research in the memory domain using the Speed-Accuracy Tradeoff (SAT) method suggests that the amount of information actively maintained in working memory is quite small-perhaps as little as 1 item. This leaves very little room for individual differences in memory capacity, and suggests that alternative explanations for comprehension failure must be found. The goal of the present project is to begin exploring these alternatives via the following three aims: 1) Adaptation of the Speed-Accuracy Tradeoff (SAT) method for use with poor readers. Adaptation is required because the method puts time-pressure on participants to respond in a particular fashion, and poor readers may have difficulty meeting this pressure due to insufficient reading ability or inhibitions caused by awareness of their reading disability. The availability of this method for use with a broader population will enable us to determine whether such a severe limit on WM capacity is characteristic of throughout the range of reading ability, or whether it is concomitant with acquired reading skill. 2) The SAT method is unique in providing precise measures of the speed with which participants may access the contents of memory. Research with skilled readers from college populations suggests a very fast cue-driven access mechanism that serves to compensate for the restricted WM capacity by quickly restoring necessary information into active memory. We will investigate whether individual differences in the speed with which readers can restore previously occurring information may provide an alternative account of comprehension failure. In order to more broadly sample reading ability, we will focus on the population of non- degree seeking adolescents sampled throughout the community. 3) A consequence of cue-driven memory access is interference from similar, but incorrect items also present in memory. Interference may be increased if lexical representations are poor or else if retrieval speed for the correct item is slowed by competitors. We employ the SAT method to distinguish these possibilities. These investigations will reveal whether individual differences in the way that comprehension processes interact with the contents of memory are qualitative or quantitative. This is important for determining the most judicious remediation methods, especially the value of differential stress on measures for increasing retrieval speed (i.e., fluency) versus those that increase accuracy (i.e., vocabulary knowledge).
A frequent explanation for reading and language comprehension difficulty is that individuals differ in their Working Memory (WM) capacity, yet recent research suggests that the amount of information actively maintained in WM is quite small-perhaps as little as 1 item. This leaves very little room for individual differences in memory capacity, and suggests that alternative explanations for comprehension failure must be found. The goal of this project is to begin exploring these alternatives using a novel extension of the Speed- Accuracy Tradeoff technique, which has been used widely in memory research with skilled readers, but never with such a broad range of reading ability as that proposed in the current project.
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| Van Dyke, Julie A; Johns, Clinton L; Kukona, Anuenue (2014) Low working memory capacity is only spuriously related to poor reading comprehension. Cognition 131:373-403 |
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| Kuperman, Victor; Van Dyke, Julie A (2011) Effects of individual differences in verbal skills on eye-movement patterns during sentence reading. J Mem Lang 65:42-73 |
| Shankweiler, Donald; Palumbo, Laura Conway; Fulbright, Robert K et al. (2010) Testing the limits of language production in long-term survivors of major stroke: A psycholinguistic and anatomic study. Aphasiology 24:1455-1485 |
