The differential relations between verbal, numerical and spatial working memory abilities and children’s reading comprehension

Working memory predicts children's reading comprehension but it is not clear whether this relation is due to a modality-specific or general working memory. This study, which investigated the relations between children's reading skills and working memory (WM) abilities in 3 modalities, extends previous work by including measures of both reading comprehension and reading accuracy. Tests of word reading accuracy and reading comprehension, and working memory tests in three different modalities (verbal, numerical and spatial), were given to 197 6- to 11-year old children. The results support the view that working memory tasks that require the processing and recall of symbolic information (words and numbers) are better predictors of reading comprehension than tasks that require visuo-spatial storage and processing. The different measures of verbal and numerical working memory were not equally good predictors of reading comprehension, but their predictive power depended on neither the word vs. numerical contrast nor the complexity of the processing component. In general, performance on the verbal and numerical working memory tasks predicted reading comprehension, but not reading accuracy, and spatial WM did not predict either. The patterns of relations between the measures of working memory and reading comprehension ability were relatively constant across the age group tested

Reading comprehension: nature, assessment and teaching.

The goal of reading is understanding. In order to understand print, a child must be able to decode the words on the page and to extract meaning. A large body of research focuses on how children learn to decode text and how best to foster children’s decoding skills. In contrast, we know much less about the process of reading comprehension in children. In this booklet we first consider what is required in order to ‘read for meaning’. We then move on to discuss children who have difficulties with reading comprehension. Our aim is to enable teachers to assess individual differences in reading and to foster the comprehension strategies that characterize fluent reading

Homology modelling of transferrin-binding protein A from Neisseria meningitidis

Neisseria meningitidis, a causative agent of bacterial meningitis, obtains transferrin-bound iron by expressing two outer membrane located transferrin-binding proteins, TbpA and TbpB. TbpA is thought to be an integral outer membrane pore that facilitates iron uptake. Evidence suggests that TbpA is a useful antigen for inclusion in a vaccine effective against meningococcal disease, hence the identification of regions involved in ligand binding is of paramount importance to design strategies to block uptake of iron. The protein shares sequence and functional similarities to the Escherichia coli siderophore receptors FepA and FhuA, whose structures have been determined. These receptors are composed of two domains, a 22-stranded b-barrel and an N-terminal plug region that sits within the barrel and occludes the transmembrane pore. A three-dimensional TbpA model was constructed using FepA and FhuA structural templates, hydrophobicity analysis and homology modelling. TbpA was found to possess a similar architecture to the siderophore receptors. In addition to providing insights into the highly immunogenic nature of TbpA and allowing the prediction of potentially important ligandbinding epitopes, the model also reveals a narrow channel through its entire length. The relevance of this channel and the spatial arrangement of external loops, to the mechanism of iron translocation employed by TbpA is discussed

Gender representation in different languages and grammatical marking on pronouns: when beauticians, musicians, and mechanics remain men

Gygax, Gabriel, Sarrasin, Oakhill, and Garnham (2008) showed that readers form a mental representation of gender that is based on grammatical gender in French and German (i.e., masculine supposedly interpretable as a generic form) but is based on stereotypical information in English. In this study, a modification of their stimulus material was used to examine the additional potential influence of pronouns. Across the three languages, pronouns differ in their grammatical gender marking: The English they is gender neutral, the French ils is masculine, and the German sie, although interpretable as generic, is morphologically feminine. Including a later pronominal reference to a group of people introduced by a plural role name significantly altered the masculine role name’s grammatical influence only in German, suggesting that grammatical cues that match (as in French) do not have a cumulative impact on the gender representation, whereas grammatical cues that mismatch (as in German) do counteract one another. These effects indicate that subtle morphological relations between forms actually used in a sentence and other forms have an immediate impact on language processing, although information about the other forms is not necessary for comprehension and may, in some cases, be detrimental to it

Anaphoric islands and anaphoric forms: the role of explicit and implicit focus

Two experiments are reported in which people resolve references to sets of entities (e.g. lies) that have previously been introduced either explicitly into a text (“the lies”) or implicitly via a cognate verb (a form of the verb “to lie”). Pronominal references to such entities were judged as relatively unacceptable, and required longer judgement times when judgements were positive, compared to cases in which the antecedent was explicit. This finding suggests that the inference from the activity of lying to a set of lies is made in the backwards direction (Garnham & Oakhill, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 40A, 719-735) . Results with full noun phrase anaphors show a different pattern, with no penalty in either times or acceptability judgements for the implicit case. The results are discussed in terms of Sanford and Garrod’s (1981, Understanding written language) hypotheses about reference processing and the notion of the centrality of an antecedent in a scenario

Remember they were emotional - effects of emotional qualifiers during sentence processing

We investigated whether emotional information facilitates retrieval and whether it makes representations more salient during sentence processing. Participants were presented with sentences including entities (nouns) that were either bare, with no additional information or that were emotionally or neutrally qualified by means of adjectives. Reading times in different word regions, specifically at the region following the verb where retrieval processes are measurable, were analysed. Qualified representations needed longer time to be build up than bare representations. Also, it was found that the amount of information and the type of information affect sentences processing and more specifically retrieval. In particular, retrieval for emotionally specified representations was faster than that for bare representations

Social-consensus feedback as a strategy to overcome spontaneous gender stereotypes

Across two experiments the present research examined the use of social-consensus feedback as a strategy for overcoming spontaneous gender stereotyping when certain social role nouns and professional terms are read. Participants were presented with word pairs comprising a role noun (e.g. surgeon) and a kinship term (e.g. mother), and asked to decide whether both terms could refer to the same person. In the absence of training, participants responded more slowly and less accurately to stereotype incongruent pairings (e.g. surgeon/mother) than stereotype congruent pairings (e.g. surgeon/father). When participants were provided with (fictitious) social consensus feedback, constructed so as to suggest that past participants did not succumb to stereotypes, performance to incongruent pairings improved significantly (Experiment 1). The mechanism(s) through which the social feedback operated were then investigated (Experiment 2), with results suggesting that success was owing to social compliance processes. Implications of findings for the field of discourse processing are discussed

Tracking your emotions – an eye-tracking study on reader's engagement with perspective during text comprehension

An eye-tracking study explored perspective effects on eye-movements during reading. We presented texts that included either a personal perspective (you) or an onlooker perspective (he/she). We measured whether fixations on the pronouns themselves differed as a function of perspective, and whether fixations on pronouns were affected by the emotional valence of the text which was either positive or negative. It was found that early in the text, processing of you is easier than he or she. However, as the character referred to by he/she becomes more familiar, fixations on he/she decrease, specifically in negative contexts

‘Just reading’: the impact of a faster pace of reading narratives on the comprehension of poorer adolescent readers in English classrooms

Poorer adolescent readers are often regarded by teachers as unable to read whole narratives and given short, simplified texts, yet are expected to analyse every part in a slow laborious read through. This article reports on a mixed methods study in which 20 English teachers in the South of England changed their current practice to read two whole challenging novels at a faster pace than usual in 12 weeks with their average and poorer readers ages 12-13. Ten teachers received additional training in teaching comprehension. Students in both groups made 8.5 months’ mean progress on standardised tests of reading comprehension, but the poorer readers made a surprising 16 months progress but with no difference made by the training programme. Simply reading challenging, complex novels aloud and at a fast pace in each lesson repositioned ‘poorer readers’ as ’good’ readers, giving them a more engaged uninterrupted reading experience over a sustained period. However, the qualitative data showed that teachers with the additional training provided a more coherent faster read and better supported poorer readers by explicitly teaching inference, diagnosed students’ ‘sticking places’ mid-text and created socially cohesive guided reading groups that further supported weaker readers but also stretched the average/good readers

The Interaction of morphological and stereotypical gender information in Russian

Previous research, for example in English, French, German, and Spanish, has investigated the interplay between grammatical gender information and stereotype gender information (e.g., that secretaries are usually female, in many cultures), in the interpretation of both singular noun phrases (the secretary) and plural nouns phrases, particularly so-called generic masculines—nouns that have masculine grammatical gender but that should be able to refer to both groups of men and mixed groups of men and women. Since the studies have been conducted in cultures with broadly similar stereotypes, the effects generally reflect differences in the grammatical systems of the languages. Russian has a more complex grammatical gender system than the languages previously studied, and, unlike those languages frequently presents examples in which grammatical gender is marked on the predicate (in an inflection on the verb). In this study we collected stereotype norms for 160 role names in Russian, providing a useful resource for further work in this language. We also conducted a reading time study examining the interaction of grammatical and stereotype gender information in the interpretation of both Russian singular noun phrases, and plurals that were (potentially) generic masculines. Our results show that, although both types of gender information are used, when available, the effects of grammatical marking on the predicate are not as strong as those of such marking on subject noun phrases