Title: Coordination of linguistic and cognitive processes during reading development
Speaker: Yi Ting Huang
Date: March 13, 2013; 12-1 PM
Room: LeFrak Hall Room 0135
Abstract:
Reading development involves the ability to efficiently retrieve relevant representations (e.g., visual, orthographic, phonological) during real-time processing. The goal of this project is to understand how individual differences in executing these procedures predict reading development in children. The Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) task has long been used as a quick and effective assessment of children’s current reading abilities and their likelihood of experiencing future reading difficulties. In the RAN task, children are asked to verbally produce the names of an array of visually-displayed items as quickly and accurately as possible. However, while final response times vary from child-to-child, they provide limited details about the component processes generating individual differences during performance. These may reflect the initial comprehension of an item (e.g., retrieval of orthographic or phonological features), its subsequent production (e.g., coordinating articulatory gestures), or both. In contrast, the current studies combine the RAN task with an eye-tracking while speaking paradigm in order to isolate which aspects of processing actually predict reading development. In doing so, they test whether difficulties during reading development occur because of processing differences in comprehension only (single deficit), in both comprehension and production (dual deficit), or in general processing speed. Findings from this research will strengthen our theoretical understanding of reading development and suggest possible treatments for reading difficulties.
