This study is part of a broader project aimed at developing cognitive and neurocognitive profiles of adolescent and young adult readers whose educational and occupational prospects are constrained by their limited literacy skills. We explore the relationships among reading-related abilities in participants ages 16 to 24 years spanning a wide range of reading ability. Two specific questions are addressed: (a) Does the simple view of reading capture all nonrandom variation in reading comprehension? (b) Does orally assessed vocabulary knowledge account for variance in reading comprehension, as predicted by the lexical quality hypothesis? A comprehensive battery of cognitive and educational tests was employed to assess phonological awareness, decoding, verbal working memory, listening comprehension, reading comprehension, word knowledge, and experience with print. In this heterogeneous sample, decoding ability clearly played an important role in reading comprehension. The simple view of reading gave a reasonable fit to the data, although it did not capture all of the reliable variance in reading comprehension as predicted. Orally assessed vocabulary knowledge captured unique variance in reading comprehension even after listening comprehension and decoding skill were accounted for. We explore how a specific connectionist model of lexical representation and lexical access can account for these findings.

Gough and Tunmer’s (1986) simple view of reading (SVR) proposed that reading comprehension (RC) is a function of language comprehension (LC) and word recognition/decoding. Braze et al. (2007) presented data suggesting an extension of the SVR in which knowledge of vocabulary (V) affected RC over and above the effects of LC. Tunmer and Chapman (2012) found a similar independent contribution of V to RC when the data were analyzed by hierarchical regression. However, additional analysis by factor analysis and structural equation modeling indicated that the effect of V on RC was, in fact, completely captured by LC itself and there was no need to posit a separate direct effect of V on RC. In the present study, we present new data from young adults with sub-optimal reading skill (N = 286). Latent variable and regression analyses support Gough and Tunmer’s original proposal and the conclusions of Tunmer and Chapman that V can be considered a component of LC and not an independent contributor to RC.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate the impact of literacy skills in young adults on the distribution of cerebral activity during comprehension of sentences in spoken and printed form. The aim was to discover where speech and print streams merge, and whether their convergence is affected by the level of reading skill. The results from different analyses all point to the conclusion that neural integration of sentence processing across speech and print varies positively with the reader's skill. Further, they identify the inferior frontal region as the principal site of speech-print integration and a major focus of reading comprehension differences. The findings provide new evidence of the role of the inferior frontal region in supporting supramodal systems of linguistic representation.

We present new evidence based on fMRI for the existence and neural architecture of an abstract supramodal language system that can integrate linguistic inputs arising from different modalities such that speech and print each activate a common code. Working with sentence material, our aim was to find out where the putative supramodal system is located and how it responds to comprehension challenges. To probe these questions we examined BOLD activity in experienced readers while they performed a semantic categorization task with matched written or spoken sentences that were either well-formed or contained anomalies of syntactic form or pragmatic content. On whole-brain scans, both anomalies increased net activity over non-anomalous baseline Correspondence to: Dave Braze (braze@haskins.yale.edu). Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptCortex. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2012 April 1. sentences, chiefly at left frontal and temporal regions of heteromodal cortex. The anomaly sensitive sites correspond approximately to those that previous studies (Constable et al., 2004, Michael et al., 2001) have found to be sensitive to other differences in sentence complexity (object relative minus subject relative). Regions of interest (ROIs) were defined by peak response to anomaly averaging over modality conditions. Each anomaly-sensitive ROI showed the same pattern of response across sentence types in each modality. Voxel-by-voxel exploration over the whole brain based on a cosine similarity measure of common function confirmed the specificity of supramodal zones. Keywordsreading; speech; comprehension; sentence processing; functional magnetic resonance imaging Supramodal potential, or the ability to glean similar information from spoken and written forms of a message, is an essential characteristic of the language brain, making it possible to convey linguistic messages by writing as well as speech. Of course, many perceptual abilities, such as object and person perception, also exhibit supramodal potential in the sense that people can recognize the same entity on the basis of sensory input in various modalities. Supramodality in language is special in requiring for its realization a long period of learning and instruction. Clearly, the human brain is not automatically adapted for reading and writing as soon as a person is able to speak and understand speech. Yet, only in recent years has the neural architecture of the supramodal language system and its development been an object of study in its own right. In undertaking this re...

Although Complement Coercion has been systematically associated with computational cost, there remains a serious confound in the experimental evidence built up in previous studies. The confound arises from the fact that lexico-semantic differences within the set of verbs assumed to involve coercion have not been taken into consideration. From among the set of verbs that have been reported to exhibit complement coercion effects we identified two clear semantic classes - aspectual verbs and psychological verbs. We hypothesize that the semantic difference between the two should result in differing processing profiles. Aspectual predicates (begin) trigger coercion and processing cost while psychological predicates (enjoy) do not. Evidence from an eye-tracking experiment supports our hypothesis. Coercion costs are restricted to aspectual predicates while no such effects are found with psychological predicates. These findings have implications for how these two kinds of predicates might be lexically encoded as well as for whether the observed interpolation of eventive meaning can be attributed to type-shifting (e.g. McElree et al., 2001) or to pragmatic-inferential processes (e.g. De Almeida, 2004).

Recent studies have found considerable individual variation in language comprehenders’ predictive behaviors, as revealed by their anticipatory eye movements during language comprehension. The current study investigated the relationship between these predictive behaviors and the language and literacy skills of a diverse, community-based sample of young adults. We found that rapid automatized naming (RAN) was a key determinant of comprehenders’ prediction ability (e.g., as reflected in predictive eye movements to a WHITE CAKE on hearing “The boy will eat the white…”). Simultaneously, comprehension-based measures predicted participants’ ability to inhibit eye movements to objects that shared features with predictable referents but were implausible completions (e.g., as reflected in eye movements to a white but inedible WHITE CAR). These findings suggest that the excitatory and inhibitory mechanisms that support prediction during language processing are closely linked with specific cognitive abilities that support literacy. We show that a self-organizing cognitive architecture captures this pattern of results.

Evidence is presented that eye-movement patterns during reading distinguish costs associated with the syntactic processing of sentences from costs associated with relating sentence meaning to real world probabilities. Participants (N = 30) read matching sets of sentences that differed by a single word, making the sentence syntactically anomalous (but understandable), pragmatically anomalous, or non-anomalous. Syntactic and pragmatic anomaly each caused perturbations in eye movements. Subsequent to the anomaly, the patterns diverged. Syntactic anomaly generated many regressions initially, with rapid return to baseline. Pragmatic anomaly resulted in lengthened reading times, followed by a gradual increase in regressions that reached a maximum at the end of the sentence. Evidence of rapid sensitivity to pragmatic information supports the use of timing data in resolving the debate over the autonomy of linguistic processing. The divergent patterns of eye movements support indications from neurocognitive studies of a principled distinction between syntactic and pragmatic processing procedures within the language processing mechanism.

This exploratory study investigated relations between individual differences in cortical grey matter structure and young adult readers’ cognitive profiles. Whole-brain analyses revealed neuroanatomical correlations with word and nonword reading ability (decoding), and experience with printed matter. Decoding was positively correlated with grey matter volume (GMV) in left superior temporal sulcus, and thickness (GMT) in right superior temporal gyrus. Print exposure was negatively correlated with GMT in left inferior frontal gyrus (pars opercularis) and left fusiform gyrus (including the visual word form area). Both measures also correlated with supramarginal gyrus (SMG), but in spatially distinct subregions: decoding was positively associated with GMV in left anterior SMG, and print exposure was negatively associated with GMT in left posterior SMG. Our comprehensive approach to assessment both confirms and refines our understanding of the novel relation between the structure of pSMG and proficient reading, and unifies previous research relating cortical structure and reading skill.