Evidence for Semantic Facilitation in Resilient, But Not Poor, ReadersSuzanne Welcome and Christine Chiarello

University of California, Riverside

Introduction

AcknowledgmentThis research was supported by NIDCD grant 5R01DC6957.

•Case studies suggest that poor phonological processing skills do not necessarily lead to poor word reading or reading comprehension in adults (Stothard, Snowling & Hulme, 1996; Holmes & Standish, 1996; Howard & Best, 1997).

•Resilient readers show large discrepancy between their phonological decoding abilities and text comprehension skills.

•One potential form of compensation is reliance on orthographic processing:

•Individuals with poor phonological skills but good comprehension showed faster RT in spelling task (Holmes & Standish, 1996) and responded more quickly to irregular words than to regular words (Howard & Best, 1997)

•Alternately, these readers could rely more heavily on word meaning information

•Younger and poorer readers benefit more from presentation of a word or a pseudohomophone (like BRANE) in the context of a meaningful sentence than older and more skilled readers (Nation & Snowling, 1998)•An individual with good comprehension/poor phonological processing showed large improvements in pseudohomophone reading when items were primed by related words (TOMATO- SAWCE) (Stothard et al., 1996)

Resilient readers show deficits in phonological tasks equivalent to deficits shown by poor readers

•Impaired phoneme awareness and verbal working memory

No evidence for superior orthographic analysis skills among resilient readers

•Equivalent performance to poor readers on orthographic choice and no evidence for differential use of orthographic analogy

Resilient readers may rely more on word meanings to guide word recognition.

•Word meanings appear to be activated to a greater extent in resilient readers than poor readers

Good knowledge and use of word meaning information may allow some individuals to compensate for poor phonological decoding.

•Consistent with Interactive Compensatory Model (Stanovich, 1980), which holds that greater reliance on semantic factors like context can compensate for deficiencies in lower-level processes

Proficient Readers

Resilient Readers

Poor

Readers

Group

Differences

Word Attack 62 20 21 Res/Poor < Pro

Passage Comp. 69 66 29 Poor < Res/Pro

Word Identification 61 40 26 Poor < Res < Pro

Verbal IQ 112 109 98 Poor < Res/Pro

Performance IQ 110 106 106 NS

Proficient Readers

Resilient Readers

Poor Readers

Group

Differences

Phoneme Deletion 80.1% 66.7% 67.8% Res/Poor < Pro

Sentence Span 3.3 2.7 2.6 Res/Poor < Pro

Pseudoword Reading Acc 86.5% 65.0% 71.0% Res/Poor < Pro

Pseudoword Reading RT 679 ms 771 ms 939 ms Pro < Poor

Orthographic Choice Acc 86.5% 81.3% 79.3% Res/Poor < Pro

Orthographic Choice RT 1456 ms 1635 ms 1495 ms NS

Semantic Priming Acc 0.2% 2.4% 0.4% NS

Semantic Priming RT 34 ms 70 ms 27 ms Res > Poor/Pro

Method

Results

640

660

680

700

720

740

760

780

800

Reaction Time (ms)

Proficient Resilient Poor

Lexical Decision Performance in Reading Groups

UnrelatedRelated

Conclusions

PARTICIPANTS

22 Proficient Readers, 21 Resilient Readers, 12 Poor Readers•18-34 years of age •28 male (11 proficient, 13 resilient, 4 poor)•6 non right-handed (2 proficient, 3 resilient, 1 poor)

TASKS•Phoneme Deletion - delete first/last sound from spoken pseudoword•Verbal working memory - sentence span •Pseudoword reading - percent of correct responses to ambiguous items (e.g., VUTH)•Orthographic Choice - select correct spelling•Semantic Priming - benefit in lexical decision performance for related over unrelated word pairs

References

Holmes V.M., Standish J.M. (1996) Skilled reading with impaired phonology: A case study. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 13(8), 1207- 1222.Howard D., Best W. (1997) Impaired non-word reading with normal word reading: A case study. Journal of Research in Reading, 20(1), 55-65.Nation K., Snowling, M.J. (1998) Individual differences in contextual facilitation: Evidence from dyslexia and poor reading comprehension. Child Development, 69(4), 996-1011. Stanovich, K.E. (1980) Toward an interactive-compensatory model of individual differences in the development of reading fluency. Research Reading Quarterly, 16(1), 32-6.Stothard S.E., Snowling M.J., Hulme C. (1996) Deficits in phonology but not dyslexic? Cognitive Neuropsychology, 13(5), 641-672.