Individual strategies of processing morphologically complex words

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Reading is an advanced and multifaceted skill critical for a productive and rewarding life in the modern society. The single most common cause of an individual's failure to develop adequate reading comprehension is a difficulty in recognizing printed words. The difficulty is particularly pronounced in a type of words which account for over 60% of the English lexicon and consist of morphemes, i.e. structural units each carrying its own form and meaning ("book" and "store" in "bookstore"). This program focuses on the processing of such complex words in healthy young low-educated adults that typically show poor performance in linguistic tasks. Complex words allow unique insights into the nature of processing deficits in low-educated readers, and the strategies that they develop to compensate for their deficits. Much experimental evidence has already been accrued about the influence that word-level characteristics have on word reading behavior. Much less is known about how this behavior is affected by the cognitive and verbal characteristics of readers. The present program proposes experimental and computational exploration of individual variability in visual recognition of complex words, as found in an understudied fraction of Canadian society. This program is innovative in its topic and choice of target population, as most prior research was based on behavioral data obtained either from children or from subject pools of highly proficient undergraduate students. The program is also comprehensive in scope in that it tests all major known skill components of reading success against a broad variety of linguistic phenomena observed in English morphology. Finally, the program is advanced in the experimental, computational and data-analytical methodologies it proposes to employ: e.g., our choice of eye-tracking (registration of eye-movements during reading) will allow for an account of the temporal unfolding of processes of complex word recognition on a millisecond time scale. This research will deepen the knowledge of fundamental cognitive processes and capacities implicated in language and reading. It will also inform educational practices for remediation of literacy and reading difficulties.