Examinations of skilled and impaired spoken and written comprehension processes

本P01的前几个周期的研究集中在音系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之间的关系。项目IV寻求 通过观察认知和神经生物学过程来扩展这项工作 口语和书面语理解的个体差异。有相当数量的孩子有 尽管有足够的词级解码能力和亚词法，但在理解方面仍存在严重问题 语音加工(Nation，2005)。如果解码和子词级语音处理不是 瓶颈导致理解能力差，必须由其他机制负责。我们建议 理解能力弱是由于相关的亚技能，如语义学和语义学的语言缺陷 句法处理，这些技能的个体差异在很大程度上将是印刷和 口语。我们的理论方法受到词汇质量假说LQH(Perfetti，2005)的启发。 它假设在任何级别(拼写、音系学、语义)指定不当的单词表示都会 导致糟糕的词汇质量(在口语和书面领域)：根据LQH，我们建议糟糕 由未指定的语义关系产生的词汇质量是主要的词汇级别约束 理解力。此外，我们还提出这一点可以扩展到关系语义和句法知识 (理解文本中的单词和概念是如何关联的)，并且这种技能是 词汇和句子/语篇水平的技能。项目IV的总体目标是(在高中人口中 学生)：a)确定支持成功的共同和独特的神经系统和行为特征 视觉和口语领域的理解，b)调查词级语义的各个方面 口语和书面语领域，以及词级知识的质量如何影响能力 将单词组合成更大的短语或句子级别的成分，并c)检查学习和 对整体理解能力的可塑性和d)研究语音加工的领域 以前在理解技能方面的探索不足：也就是韵律。

Research from previous cycles of this P01 has focused on the role of phonology in word level reading, speech perception, speech production and the relationship 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 significant number children have substantial 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 bottleneck leading to poor comprehension ability, other mechanisms must be responsible. We propose that weakness in comprehension is due to language specific deficits in relevant sub-skills such as semantic 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 poorly specified word representations at any level (orthography, phonology, semantics) 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 underspecified semantic relationships is the primary lexical level constraint on comprehension skill. Moreover, we propose that this extends to relational 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 population of high school students): a) identify the common and distinct neural systems and behavioral profiles that support successful comprehension in the visual and spoken domains, b) investigate aspects of word level semantics 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 plasticity to overall comprehension ability and d) investigate areas of phonological processing which have previously been under explored in relation to comprehension skill: namely, prosody.