Text comprehension

La comprensión de narraciones orales y las diferencias individuales en niños entre 7 y 11 años: vocabulario, memoria de trabajo y teoría de la mente Oral narrative comprehension and individual differences in 7 and 11-year-old children: vocabulary, working memory and Theory of Mind A compreensão de narrativas orais e as diferenças individuais em crianças de 7 a 11 anos: vocabulário, memória de trabalho e Teoria da Mente

This article is an overview of theoretical traditional models of text compre- hension from a psycholinguistic perspective. The main theoretical contributions are introduced, from those which exclusively focus on texts to those which consider the reader as an active factor in the process of reading comprehending. Then, a current theoretical model, relevant to both assessment and intervention for text comprehension, is discussed. This model deals with reading comprehension from a multicomponent perspective and disaggregates the components comprised in eleven abilities that allow an independent assessment. The main objective of this review is to encourage the interest in the study of reading comprehension, an essential ability for cognitive, behavioral and social deve- lopment of individuals.

ABSTRACTListening to stories and brain processing of narrative material activates many areas devoted not only to the linguistic processing. In this sense, it could be hypothesized that if this activity would be integrated within the school curricula, it could bring benefits in terms of understanding the text as well as in basic essential cognitive dimensions. In a series of studies with different age groups, we investigated the effects of an intensive training in narrative listening, through different tools such as the standardized tests of understanding of the text. We also used a neuropsychological battery investigating basic cognitive processes (cognitive assessment system) that are directly related to the ability of text comprehension. Results show a significant improvement in all tests for all age groups in the experimental groups, in comparison with the control groups.

Measures of Semantic Relatedness (MSRs) provide models of human semantic associations and, as such, have been applied to predict human text comprehension (Lemaire, Denhiere, Bellissens, & Jhean-Iarose, 2006). In addition, MSRs form key components in more integrated cognitive modeling such as models that perform information search on the World Wide Web (WWW) (Pirolli, 2005). However, the effectiveness of an MSR depends on the algorithm it uses as well as the text corpus on which it is trained. In this paper, we examine the impact of corpus selection on the performance of two popular MSRs, Pointwise Mutual Information and Normalised Google Distance. We tested these measures with corpora derived from the WWW, books, news articles, emails, web-forums, and encyclopedia. Results indicate that for the tested MSRs, the traditionally employed books and WWW-based corpora are less than optimal, and that using a corpus based on the New York Times news articles best predicts human behavior.

Digital literacy can be defined as a set of skills for searching, accessing, navigating, integrating, and evaluating the reliability of information on the internet, mainly in written form. The present study aimed to examine the contribution of executive function skills (inhibition, cognitive flexibility and working memory) to performance on a digital literacy assessment tool in college undergraduates. Eighty-five Argentinean university undergraduates (56 female, mean age 20.34 ± 4.6 years) completed a digital literacy test and a computerized executive functions battery. After controlling for vocabulary scores and sociodemographic factors, cognitive flexibility was the main predictor of digital literacy scores. In particular, it was associated with information search and integration task performances. Visuospatial working memory predicted information search scores and inhibition correlated positively with reliability evaluation tasks. Our results indicated: 1) a general involvement of cognitive flexibility in digital literacy, possibly reflecting the need to shift between multiple documents, reading or navigation strategies; 2) a specific link between visuospatial working memory and information search, which might be indicating a spatial processing load related to hyperlink navigation; and 3) a possible involvement of inhibition in the evaluation of web documents, which may contribute to the suppression of irrelevant information.

In this study we investigated word-problem (WP) item characteristics, individual differences in text comprehension and arithmetic skills, and their relations to mathematical WP-solving. The participants were 891 fourth-grade students from elementary schools in Finland. Analyses were conducted in two phases. In the first phase, WP characteristics concerning linguistic and numerical factors and their difficulty level were investigated. In contrast to our expectations, the results did not show a clear connection between WP difficulty level and their other characteristics regarding linguistic and numerical factors. In the second phase, text comprehension and arithmetic skills were used to classify participants into four groups: skilful in text comprehension but poor in arithmetic; poor in text comprehension but skilful in arithmetic; very poor in both skills; very skilful in both skills. The results indicated that WP-solving performance on both easy and difficult items was strongly rela...

This study examines the nature of the involvement load (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001) in second language (L2) lexical input processing through reading by considering the effects of the reader-based factors of L2 reading proficiency and background knowledge. The lexical input processing aspects investigated were lexical inferencing (search), attentional allocation during target word (TW) verification (evaluation), TW episodic memory after verification, TW retention, and changes in lexical input processing. This study also addresses the relationships between inferencing and retention as well as the relationships among the various phases of lexical input processing. A questionnaire on self-reported strategy use during the TW verification task was designed to examine motivation and cognitive involvement. A repeated-measures design was used with a cross-sectional sample of 35 adult L2 learners of Spanish. Participants read narratives (one more and one less familiar) that contained nonsense wo...

Little evidence is available regarding the differential impact of reading versus reading and writing on multiple source comprehension. The present study aims to: (1) compare the inferential comprehension performance of students in reading versus reading/synthesis conditions; (2) explore the impact of performing the tasks on paper versus on screen with Read&Answer (R&A) software; and (3) explore the extent to which rereading, notetaking, and the quality of the written synthesis can explain student’s comprehension scores. For the students in the synthesis condition, we also examined the relationship between the quality of the synthesis they produced and the comprehension they achieved. 155 psychology undergraduates were randomly assigned either to the reading (n = 78) or to the reading/synthesis condition (n = 77). From this sample, 79 participants carried out the task with the Read&Answer software, and 76 solved the task on paper. All the students took a prior knowledge questionnaire...