Individual strategies of processing morphologically complex words

阅读是一种先进的、多方面的技能，对现代社会中富有成效和回报的生活至关重要。一个人未能培养出足够的阅读理解能力的最常见原因是识别印刷体单词的困难。这一困难在一类词中尤为明显，这类词占英语词汇的60%以上，由语素组成，即每个结构单位都有自己的形式和意义(“book”和“store”在“bookstore”中)。这个项目关注的是健康的年轻低学历成年人对这些复杂单词的处理，这些成年人在语言任务中表现得通常很差。复杂的单词可以让我们对低教育程度读者处理缺陷的本质，以及他们为弥补缺陷而制定的策略有独特的见解。关于词汇水平特征对词汇阅读行为的影响，已经积累了大量的实验证据。读者的认知和语言特征是如何影响这一行为的，我们知之甚少。本计划建议对复杂单词视觉识别中的个体变异性进行实验和计算探索，就像加拿大社会中一个研究不足的部分所发现的那样。该项目在主题和目标人群的选择上是创新的，因为之前的大多数研究都是基于从儿童或从高水平本科生的学科池中获得的行为数据。该计划的范围也是全面的，因为它测试了阅读成功的所有主要已知技能成分，并对照英语词法中观察到的各种语言现象进行了测试。最后，该程序在它建议采用的实验、计算和数据分析方法方面是先进的：例如，我们选择的眼球跟踪(在阅读过程中记录眼球运动)将允许在毫秒时间尺度上描述复杂单词识别过程的时间展开。这项研究将加深对语言和阅读所涉及的基本认知过程和能力的了解。它还将为纠正识字和阅读困难的教育做法提供信息。

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.