Psycholinguistic Processing in Reading and Listening among Good and Poor Readers

Abstract

Abstract. Differences in psycholinguistic processing of written and spoken language, and psycholinguistic deficiencies of poor readers were studied by giving meaningful, anomalous and random word strings to 18 good and 18 poor readers. In both spoken and written conditions the order of recall was meaningful > anomalous > random (p < .001), suggesting that syntactic and semantic demands of spoken and written sentences were similar. Poor readers were inferior to good readers on written presentations (p < .05). The groups were similar on spoken presentations. The reading comprehension deficiency could not be attributed to inadequate psycholinguistic processing, memory or automaticity in decoding. Incomplete decoding during silent reading by poor readers was supported as an explanation.

Cognition and Instruction of Poor Readers

“…While poor readers certainly process the most salient semantic properties of written sentences (Guthrie & Tyler, 1976), and isolated words in print (Golinkoff & Rosinski, 1976), there is evidence that poor readers are nevertheless weaker in processing more subtle sematic features. For example, Samuels, Begy & Chen (1976) illustrated that poor readers were inferior to good readers on filling in the the spaces when presented with a stimulus of black c or deep sn This may be interpreted as indicating that poor readers were inferior in using the lexical cue "black" that was available to assist in the identification of the word cat.…”

“…The ability to segment written language and process its constituents separately would seem to be useful for comprehension. To examine this segmentation in poor readers, Guthrie and Tyler (1976) compared the immediate recall of meaningful, anomalous and random word strings during reading and listening for good and poor readers. These types of word strings were used since the difference between the recall of meaningful and anomalous word strings is thought to reflect semantic processing and the difference between the recall of anomalous and random strings is thought to be an index of syntactic processing (McNeil, 1970).…”

Profiles of Listening and Reading Comprehension

“…Some researchers have provided support for the argument that the process of understanding texts is common to listening and reading (Guthrie & Tyler, 1976; SmiIey, Oakley, Worthen, Cam- pione, & Brown, 1977). However, other researchers argue that we have yet to understand the subprocesses of comprehension and how they are orchestrated in the acts of listening and reading (Danks & End, 1987; Farr, Carey, & Tone, 1986).…”

The Performance of Third Grade Learning Disabled Boys on Tasks at Different Levels of Language

“…Since children with reading disability are normally reading less sophisticated texts in their classrooms (Allington, 1983), it is possible that lack of exposure to complex linguistic structures in reading may have resulted in less facility with these structures in oral language. While it is impossible to control this differential exposure to texts, one compromise has been to use a reading level matched control group, or a group of younger children reading at the same level as the reading disabled students (Guthrie & Tyler, 1976 Guthrie, 1977). Inclusion of a younger control group would also allow the evaluation of developmental hypotheses, or at least provide evidence as to whether children with reading disabilities are qualitatively different from their peers or whether they are merely delayed in certain skills.…”