Individual Differences in Comprehension across the Lifespan

使用口语进行交流的能力是人类的一项核心能力。语言是社会和教育发展的基础，没有强大的语言技能，人们很难积极参与社会。口语使我们能够迅速地将说话者的思想传递到听者的思想。这种转换依赖于听者快速理解他们听到的每个单词的意思的能力：他们必须对每个单词的预期意思做出“最佳猜测”。快速准确地理解口语单词的意思的能力是至关重要的，不仅对于使用口语进行交流，而且为熟练的阅读理解提供基础。“词汇歧义”的存在使得理解单词的意思变得更加困难，“词汇歧义”指的是多个概念。例如，当听到“What an enormous trunk!”这个句子时，听者必须弄清楚说话者指的是大象的鼻子、大行李箱、汽车的后备箱还是树的主干。准确、快速地消除词义歧义的能力对交流至关重要：英语中大约80%的常用词有多种字典定义。举个例子，作为国家课程测试的一部分，英国11岁的孩子们接受了这篇课文的第一句话：“黎明在Sawubona野生动物保护区的玫瑰色天空上投下了金色的线。”这句话中的单词平均有8.8个字典定义：例如，孩子们必须弄清楚“Dawn”不是指女孩的名字，“game”不是指竞技运动。此外，“cast”和“threads”并不是指物理动作或物体，而是有更多的隐喻性解释。虽然我们中的许多人都能够毫不费力地准确地消除大多数单词的歧义，但研究表明，在这项技能上存在巨大的个体差异：有些人速度较慢，更容易出错，同样的人在理解测试中也往往表现不佳。该项目旨在揭示这些困难的原因，作为确定如何在课堂或诊所中最好地帮助他们的第一步。这一点很重要，因为语言理解能力差与学习阅读困难、社交和情感不愉快以及不良行为有关。目前的研究将开发新的儿童友好的方法来评估理解含有歧义词的口语句子的能力。我们将使用这些方法来发现导致个体理解单词能力差异的因素。我们将测试两种类型的解释。第一种观点认为语言因素至关重要——一个人对词义的存储知识在质量或数量上存在差异。第二种解释是，人们的差异在于他们在选择和转换不同意义时的灵活性，而不是他们对意义本身的了解。我们将使用计算模型和实验方法来评估这些因素如何共同作用以带来理解。最后，我们将从实验室转移到教室，对小学生进行一项干预研究，以评估在听精心构建的故事的同时玩文字游戏是否可以提高理解能力。这些问题的答案对于提高学龄儿童的理解能力至关重要。国家课程将语言和交流视为教育成就的关键，并将相当多的教学时间用于提高在国家考试中的表现。不幸的是，以证据为基础的提高理解能力的教学策略并没有得到很好的发展，当然与那些适用于单词阅读的教学策略相比。本研究将为更大规模的干预提供理论框架和实证依据。

The ability to communicate using spoken language is a core human ability. Language provides the foundation for social and educational development and without strong language skills, people struggle to participate positively in society. Spoken language allows us to rapidly transfer ideas from the mind of the speaker to the mind of the listener. This transfer relies on the ability of the listener to quickly access the meaning of each word that they hear: they must make 'best guesses' about the intended meaning of each word. The ability to rapidly and accurately understand the meanings of spoken words is vital, not only for communication using spoken language, but also to provide the foundation for skilled reading comprehension.Accessing the meanings of words is made more difficult by the presence of 'lexical ambiguity': words that can refer to more than one concept. For example, when accessing the sentence "What an enormous trunk!" the listener must work out whether the speaker was referring to an elephant's nose, a large suitcase, a car's boot, or the main stem of a tree.The ability to accurately and rapidly disambiguate word meanings is vital for communication: approximately 80% of common words in English have multiple dictionary definitions. Take for example the first sentence of the text given to 11-year-old children across England as part of the national curriculum tests: "Dawn was casting spun-gold threads across a rosy sky over Sawubona game reserve". The words in this sentence have on average 8.8 dictionary definitions: children must, for example, work out that "Dawn" does not refer to a girl's name and that "game" does not refer to a competitive sport. In addition, "cast" and "threads" do not refer to physical actions or objects, but have more metaphorical interpretations.While many of us are able to accurately disambiguate most words without obvious effort, research has revealed large individual differences in this skill: some people are slower and more error prone and the same people also tend to perform poorly tests of comprehension more generally. This project aims to uncover the causes of these difficulties as a first step to identifying how best to help them in the classroom or clinic. This is important as poor language comprehension is associated with difficulty learning to read, with social and emotional unhappiness and with poor behaviour.The current research will develop novel child-friendly methods for assessing the ability to understand spoken sentences containing ambiguous words. We will use these methods to discover the factors that contribute to individual differences in the ability to understand words. We will test two types of explanation. The first sees linguistic factors as critical - qualitative or quantitative differences in the stored knowledge a person has about word meanings. The second type of explanation is that people differ in how flexible they can be in selecting and switching between alternative meanings, rather than their knowledge of the meanings themselves. We will use computational models and experimental methods to assess how these factors work together to bring about comprehension. Finally, we will move from the laboratory to the classroom to conduct an intervention study in primary age children to assess whether comprehension can be enhanced by playing word games while listening to carefully constructed stories.Answers to these questions are critical for efforts to improve comprehension skills in school aged children. The National Curriculum sees language and communication as essential for educational achievement, and considerable teaching time is devoted to improving performance in national tests. Unfortunately, evidence-based teaching strategies for improving comprehension are not well-developed, certainly in comparison with those in place for word reading. This research will provide the theoretical framework and empirical basis for larger scale interventions.