Lexical expertise and reading skill: bottom-up and top-down processing of lexical ambiguity

Abstract

The lexical quality hypothesis assumes that skilled readers rely on high quality lexical representations that afford autonomous lexical retrieval and reduce the need to rely on top-down context. This experiment investigated this hypothesis by comparing the performance of adults classified on reading comprehension and spelling performance. 'Lexical experts', defined by above average performance on both measures, were compared with individuals who are good readers/poor spellers, poor readers/good spellers, or poor on both measures. Sentences finishing with a homograph (e.g., She danced all night at the ball) were followed by a probe word and participants had to decide whether it had occurred in the sentence. Critical probe words were related to either the sentence-congruous or the sentence-incongruous meaning of the homograph (e.g., waltz vs. throw). Lexical experts showed less interference from related probes than the other groups. When the sentences were presented at fast rates, poorer spellers showed interference for sentence-congruous but not sentence-incongruous probes. However, at slower presentation rates, all groups showed equivalent interference for both types of probes. The results support the lexical quality hypothesis by showing that high quality lexical representations, indexed by better spelling, are associated with reduced reliance on sentence context.

Lexical Quality and Reading Skill: Bottom-Up and Top-Down Contributions to Sentence Processing

“…These measures are correlated with verbal ability and listening comprehension so, although generally confirming the importance of bottom-up processing in skilled sentence reading, Ashby et al's results do not provide direct evidence for the role of high-quality lexical representations. Andrews and Bond (2009) attempted to more directly test the lexical quality hypothesis by supplementing measures of reading comprehension with tests of spelling. Spelling indexes the precision that defines high-quality lexical representations because correct spelling necessitates full specification of orthographic structure, which is not as crucial for effective reading (Perfetti, 1992).…”

“…Equally good readers who were below average in spellingthe Good Reader/Poor Speller profile that Frith (1980) identified with use of a top-down reading strategy-showed significant contextual interference effects that were almost identical to individuals below average on both reading and spelling. However, because Andrews and Bond (2009) used a probe memory task, it is possible that the results are due to differences in sentence comprehension rather than lexical quality per se-for example, lexical experts may encode a more veridical representation of the sentence, reducing their susceptibility to false memories for related probes.…”

“…To assess the role of memory load, we added a word-report condition in which participants were only required to report the selected word without the rest of the sentence (Bond & Andrews, 2008). To index lexical quality, participants completed measures of reading and spelling that have been demonstrated to predict performance in both word identification and sentence-processing tasks (Andrews & Bond, 2009;Andrews & Hersch, 2010). To allow lexical processing to be separated from more general aspects of written language proficiency, we also assessed vocabulary and verbal working memory.…”

“…Six brief measures of written language proficiency that have been demonstrated to discriminate effectively among university students and produce relatively normal distributions of scores in several studies of individual differences in reading and spelling (Andrews, 2008;Andrews & Bond, 2009;Andrews & Hersch, 2010) were employed. 2 These included two measures each of reading and spelling, the variables argued to define lexical expertise, along with a vocabulary test and a reading span measure of verbal working memory to assess the contribution of more general cognitive attributes that might influence reading performance.…”

A Developmental Study of Chinese Children’s Word and Character Reading

“…The results suggested that, as compared to average readers, high-skilled readers' word identification is not strongly influenced by context. In another study by Andrews and Bond (2009), lexical experts' memory for target words in sentences was not significantly affected by meaning related words, but poor spellers had significantly stronger interference when meaning related words compared to unrelated words were tested.…”