Retrieval interference in skilled and unskilled reading comprehsension

描述（由申请人提供）：阅读能力差会对发展中的儿童产生深刻的认知、情感和行为影响，如果不加以纠正，最终会对成人造成经济后果。事实上，2003年关于成人读写能力和生活技能的报告（加拿大统计局和经济合作与发展组织，2005年）估计，美国16-25岁的成年人中，51%的人只能阅读简单的文本，只能进行低级的推理，这一水平被称为“低于基本水平”，不足以达到更高的教育和职业目标。这些统计数据表明，有必要了解导致成人单字以上阅读能力低下的因素。这个应用程序汇集了三个方面的发现

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.