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Why are causal and temporal connectives difficult to understand? A comparison between Italian hearing good and poor comprehenders and deaf poor comprehenders
Purpose: Both hearing poor comprehenders (PCs) and deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) PCs have problems in understanding causal and temporal coherence relations signaled by connectives. The study examined whether hearing and DHH PCs' problems with connective understanding are similar and mainly related to their limited vocabulary, including knowledge of connective words, or to their poor reading comprehension abilities more generally. Method: Three groups of 7- to 10-year-old readers, matched on grade level (hearing PCs, DHH PCs, and hearing good comprehenders [GCs]) performed a reading comprehension task, a vocabulary task, and causal and temporal connective understanding tasks. Hearing and DHH PCs were also matched on reading comprehension and decoding abilities. Results: The DHH PCs performed significantly worse than both the hearing GCs and PCs in temporal and causal connective understanding. Significant differences between hearing PCs and GCs were found only in causal connective understanding. DHH readers' difficulties in causal connective understanding were significantly associated with poorer vocabulary knowledge. In contrast, vocabulary knowledge did not uniquely contribute to hearing PCs' difficulties with causal connective understanding, once their reading comprehension skills were controlled for. Conclusions: The results suggest that despite a similar reading profile, DHH PCs' difficulties with causal connective understanding are more closely related to their vocabulary delay, whereas hearing PCs' difficulties are more strongly influenced by their poor text integration processes (as indexed by their reading comprehension skills). Neither vocabulary knowledge nor reading comprehension skills contributed to the explanation of DHH readers and hearing PCs' temporal connective understanding.</p
ERP Indicators of local and global text influences on word-to-text integration
<p>In two ERP experiments we examined local (recent text) and global (centrality) text influences on word-to-text integration. Participants read words that appeared across a sentence boundary or in text-final position. In both cases, the word was either related (central) or unrelated (non-central) to the central theme of the passage. Additionally, words across a sentence boundary had an antecedent in the preceding sentence (local binding) or did not (baseline). Results indicate local-binding processes influence sentence-initial words with no additional effect of centrality, evidenced by a reduced N400 for central and non-central words with a local-binding opportunity relative to baseline. At text-final words, we observed a reduced P600 (Experiment 1) as well as an N400 (Experiment 2) for central relative to non-central words. This pattern suggests that integration across a sentence boundary is supported by local context and that over the course of continued reading, integration begins to reflect global text meaning.</p