Retrieval interference in skilled and unskilled reading comprehsension

描述(由申请人提供)：阅读能力差会对发育中的孩子造成深刻的认知、情感和行为后果，如果得不到纠正，最终会给成年人带来经济后果。事实上，2003年关于成人识字和生活技能的报告(加拿大统计局和经济合作与发展组织，2005年)估计，51%的16-25岁的美国成年人只会阅读简单的文本，只能做出低水平的推断，这一水平被称为“低于基本水平”，不足以实现高级教育和职业目标。这些统计数据表明，在成年人中，需要了解导致阅读能力低下的因素，而不仅仅是单个单词的水平。此应用程序汇集了三个项目的调查结果 在很大程度上是独立的研究社区(记忆、成人句子和语篇处理以及阅读障碍)，并创造了一种理解理解不良的新方法。鉴于大多数基于语言学的句子和语篇水平理解的研究强调有限的一般认知能力(特别是工作记忆能力)是理解困难的来源，并且主要集中在大学水平的人群，这个项目建立在一个架构框架上，强调记忆提取作为连接单词阅读技能和更高水平综合技能的机制。基于记忆研究指出，主动记忆能力严重有限，即使是对熟练的读者来说，我们也认为理解主要取决于从被动记忆中成功提取信息。因此，在我们的具体目标1中，我们调查了导致成功提取的条件，包括不同类型的语言(语音、形态、句法、语义、语用)的组合方式，以及导致提取失败的条件--即记忆干扰的存在。我们的具体目标2结合了来自记忆研究的长期结论，表明对干扰的敏感性将由要提取的表征的质量决定，与在 阅读障碍，认为每个人的单词表征的平均质量会有所不同，这是由他们的阅读经验和处理不同类型语言信息的能力决定的。最后，我们的具体目标3调查了对提取干扰敏感的神经学基础，主要集中在连接 熟练的单词阅读对更高水平的加工，以及负责在每个水平上调节干扰的区域的贡献，特别是左额下回。我们包括大学和非大学社区的个人(16-24岁)，以提供比以前研究更具代表性的阅读能力样本，从而增加我们潜在发现的影响。此外，我们招募了一批初学者(7-9岁)，以初步调查提取的发展和对干扰的敏感性。我们期望这项研究能对阅读理解个体差异的来源有一个新的概念，并对阅读理解个体差异如何在儿童时期和成年后的发展有更深的理解。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Poor reading ability has profound cognitive, emotional, and behavioral consequences for the developing child, and-if unremediated-eventually has economic consequences for the adult. Indeed, the 2003 report on Adult Literacy and Life Skills (Statistics Canada and OECD, 2005) estimates that 51percent of US adults aged 16-25 can read only simple texts and make only low-level inferences, a level termed "below-basic," which is insufficient for attaining advanced educational and occupational goals. These statistics point to the need for understanding factors contributing to poor reading ability beyond the single-word level in the adult population. This application brings together findings from three largely independent research communities (memory, adult sentence and discourse processing, and reading disability) and creates a novel approach towards understanding poor comprehension. Whereas, the bulk of linguistically-based research into sentence and text-level comprehension has emphasized a limited set of general cognitive capacities (especially working memory capacity) as the source of comprehension difficulty, and focused primarily on the college-level population, this project is built around an architectural framework that emphasizes memory retrieval as the mechanism connecting word- reading skills and higher-level integrative skills. Building on memory research pointing to a severely limited active memory capacity, even for skilled readers, we assume that comprehension is primarily determined by the successful retrieval of information from passive memory. Thus, in our Specific Aim 1 we investigate the conditions leading to successful retrieval, including the way that different types of linguistic cus (phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic) are combined, and the conditions leading to failed retrieval- namely the presence of memory interference. Our Specific Aim 2 combines long standing conclusions from memory research, suggesting that sensitivity to interference will be determined by the quality of to-be-retrieved representations, with research in reading disability, arguing that individuals will vary in the average quality of their word representations, which are determined by their reading experience and facility for processing different types of linguistic information. Finally, our Specific Aim 3 investigates the neurologica bases of sensitivity to retrieval interference, with primary focus on the neural networks that link skilled word reading to higher level processing, and the contribution of regions responsible for mediating interference at each level, especially left inferior frontal gyrus. We include both college and non-college community-based individuals (age 16-24), to provide a more representative sample of reading ability than in previous studies and thus increase the impact of our potential findings. In addition, we recruit a sample of beginning readers (age 7-9) for an initial investigation of the development of retrieval and sensitivity to interference. We expect tht this project will result in a new conception of sources of individual variability in reading comprehension, and a deeper understanding of how these develop in childhood and persist into adulthood.