Individual strategies of processing morphologically complex words

阅读是一项先进的、多方面的技能，对现代社会中富有成效和有益的生活至关重要。一个人不能发展足够的阅读理解的最常见的原因是难以识别印刷的单词。这种困难在占英语词汇60%以上且由语素组成的一类词汇中尤为明显，即每个结构单位都有自己的形式和意义（“bookstore”中的“book”和“store”）。这个项目关注的是那些在语言任务中表现不佳的健康的、受教育程度低的年轻成年人对这些复杂单词的处理。复杂的词汇让我们对低教育程度读者的处理缺陷的本质，以及他们为弥补这些缺陷而制定的策略有了独特的见解。关于单词水平特征对单词阅读行为的影响，已有大量实验证据。对于读者的认知和语言特征如何影响这种行为，我们所知甚少。目前的计划提出了实验和计算探索在复杂单词的视觉识别的个体差异，因为在加拿大社会的一个未充分研究的部分发现。这个项目在其主题和目标人群的选择上是创新的，因为大多数先前的研究都是基于从儿童或从高水平本科生的主题池中获得的行为数据。该计划的范围也很全面，因为它测试了所有已知的阅读成功的主要技能组成部分，反对在英语形态学中观察到的各种语言现象。最后，该程序在实验、计算和数据分析方法方面是先进的，它建议采用：例如，我们选择的眼球追踪（阅读过程中眼球运动的注册）将允许在毫秒时间尺度上解释复杂单词识别过程的时间展开。这项研究将加深对涉及语言和阅读的基本认知过程和能力的认识。它还将为补救识字和阅读困难的教育实践提供信息。

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.