Examinations of skilled and impaired spoken and written comprehension processes

本P01前几个周期的研究集中在语音学在单词水平阅读中的作用， 言语感知、言语产生以及这些系统中的每一个之间的相关性。项目四寻求 通过观察认知和神经生物学过程来扩展这项工作， 理解口头和书面语言的个体差异。很多孩子 理解方面的实质性问题，尽管有足够的词级解码能力和亚词汇能力 phonological processing（Nation，2005）.如果解码和子词层面的语音处理不是 botfleneck导致理解能力差，其他机制必须负责。我们建议 理解能力的薄弱是由于相关子技能（如语义和 句法处理，这些技能的个体差异将在很大程度上共同印刷和 口语我们的理论方法是由词汇质量假设，LQH（Perfetti，2005） 它假定在任何层次（拼写，音韵，语义）上的不明确的词表示将 导致词汇质量差（在口语和书面语领域）：与LQH一致，我们提出， 由于语义关系不明确而导致的词汇质量是词汇水平的主要限制， 理解能力此外，我们建议，这延伸到relaflonal语义和句法知识 （理解文本中的单词和概念是如何联系在一起的），这种技能是沟通的桥梁。 词汇和句子/话语水平技能。项目四的主要目标是（在高中的人群中 学生）：a）识别支持成功的共同和不同的神经系统和行为特征 在视觉和口语领域的理解，B）调查方面的词级语义， 口语和书面语领域，以及这种词汇水平知识的质量如何影响 将单词组成更大的短语或短语级成分，c）检查学习的作用， 可塑性的整体理解能力和d）调查领域的语音处理， 以前被探索与理解技能：即，韵律。 相关性（参见说明）： 本课程与理解口语和书面语言能力的发展有关 这对成功的学术和生活成果至关重要。通过检查潜在的认知和神经 高中儿童口语和书面语理解问题的基础（无问题 在文字阅读或语音处理中）。项目IV对公共卫生相关性做出了重大贡献 的总体方案

Research from previous cycles of this P01 has focused on the role of phonology in word level reading, speech perception, speech production and the relaflonship between each of these systems. Project IV seeks to extend upon this work by looking at the cognitive and neurobiological processes that contribute to individual differences in comprehension of spoken and written language. A signiflcant number children have substanflal problems with comprehension, despite adequate word level decoding ability and sub- lexical phonological processing (Nation, 2005). If decoding and subword-level phonological processing are not the botfleneck leading to poor comprehension ability, other mechanisms must be responsible. We propose that weakness in comprehension is due to language speciflc deflcits in relevant sub-skills such as semanflc and syntactic processing, and that individual differences in these skills will be largely common to both printed and spoken language. Our theoretical approach is informed by the lexical quality hypothesis, LQH (Perfetti, 2005) which posits that pooriy specifled word representaflons at any level (orthography, phonology, semanflcs) will lead to poor lexical quality (in both spoken and written domains): in line with the LQH we propose that poor lexical quality that results from underspecifled semantic relationships is the primary lexical level constraint on comprehension skill. Moreover, we propose that this extends to relaflonal semantic and syntactic knowledge (understanding how words and concepts within a text are related) and that this skill is the bridge between lexical and sentence/discourse level skill. The broad goals of Project IV are to (in a populaflon of high school students): a) identify the common and disflnct neural systems and behavioral proflles that support successful comprehension in the visual and spoken domains, b) investigate aspects of word level semanflcs across both the spoken and written domains and how the quality of this word-level knowledge impacts the ability to compose words into larger phrasal or sentence-level constituents and c) examine the role of learning and plasflcity to overall comprehension ability and d) investigate areas of phonological processing which have previously been under explored in relation to comprehension skill: namely, prosody. RELEVANCE (See instructions): This program is relevant to the understanding the development of spoken and written language competence which is crucial for successful academic and life outcomes. By examining the underlying cogniflve and neural bases of both spoken and printed comprehension problems in high school aged children (without problems in word reading or phonological processing). Project IV contributes signiflcanfly to the public health relevance of the overall program