New and updated tests of print exposure and reading abilities in college students

Abstract

The relationship between print exposure and measures of reading skill was examined in college students (N=99, 58 female; mean age=20.3 years). Print exposure was measured with several new self-reports of reading and writing habits, as well as updated versions of the Author Recognition Test and the Magazine Recognition Test (Stanovich & West, 1989). Participants completed a sentence comprehension task with syntactically complex sentences, and reading times and comprehension accuracy were measured. An additional measure of reading skill was provided by participants’ scores on the verbal portions of the ACT, a standardized achievement test. Higher levels of print exposure were associated with higher sentence processing abilities and superior verbal ACT performance. The relative merits of different print exposure assessments are discussed

The Home Literacy Environment Is a Correlate, but Perhaps Not a Cause, of Variations in Children’s Language and Literacy Development

“…This variable was assessed by the Adult Author Checklist, which consists of 40 authors of contemporary fiction, representing a broad range of genres, and 40 foils (Acheson, Wells, & Macdonald, 2008; Stanovich & West, 1989). Maternal familiarity with adult fiction was considered to be an indirect measure of storybook exposure, as we would expect that parents who read for pleasure more also value reading books with their children more.…”

Individual Differences in Language Acquisition and Processing

“…These differences occur largely in low-frequency structures that are more common in written language (e.g., the English passive; sentences containing quantifiers, e.g., 'every hat has a rabbit in it') and, thus, may reflect differences in exposure to print [74]. This in turn suggests that variability in language proficiency is at least partially linked to expertise and the cognitive niches that individuals seek out.…”

Does a single session of reading literary fiction prime enhanced mentalising performance? Four replication experiments of Kidd and Castano (2013)

“…Participants proceeded with a task that gauged their familiarity with literature, which is called the author recognition test (Acheson et al, 2008). Specifically, participants were asked to identify the author names in a list with an equal number of compelling foils.…”

“…Similar to Kidd and Castano, we also measured participants' familiarity with literature, using an objective test that relies on recognition of the names of published authors (Acheson, Wells, & MacDonald, 2008). Based on prior research (Mar et al, 2006;Mar et al, 2009), we expected that familiarity with literature would be positively associated with performance on the RMET.…”