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Lexical processing skill in college-age resilient readers

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Abstract

Despite an extensive literature linking individual differences in phonological processing to reading ability, some adults show normal text comprehension abilities despite poor pseudoword reading (Jackson & Doellinger (2002). Journal of Educational Psychology, 94, 64–78). This study was undertaken to investigate differences between these individuals, termed resilient readers, and proficient readers in performance and degree of lateralization on a variety of single word processing tasks. Participants completed seven divided visual field tasks investigating various aspects of reading. Resilient readers performed less accurately on basic word recognition tasks, but not on the tasks involving semantic access. Resilient readers did not differ from proficient readers on reaction time or lateralization on any of the experimental tasks. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that skilled phonological decoding is not necessary for reading for meaning in a college population. It is proposed that higher-level semantic information and general world knowledge may allow some readers to compensate for deficiencies in lower-level word recognition processes.

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Notes

  1. While a score over 0.40 was considered indicative of a childhood history of reading disability by the designers of the ARHQ (Lefly & Pennington, 2000) a more stringent cut-off of 0.45 was used in this study. Two of the questions relate to the frequency with which participants read newspapers. Because very few of the college student participants in our study routinely read newspapers, their scores appeared artificially inflated. Therefore, we adopted a cut-off score of 0.45 to avoid falsely classifying participants as having a history of reading disability.

  2. Separate 2 × 2 ANOVAs were also performed for each task with visual field (left or right) and group (resilient or proficient) as variables. The results of these separate analyses mirror those reported here, with no significant 2-way interactions of group and visual field, and significant effects of group in accuracy for Word Naming, Pseudoword Naming, and Masked Word Recognition.

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Acknowledgments

This research was partially supported by National Institute of Deafness and Communicative Disorders grant #006957. We thank Janelle Julagay and Vanessa Miller for their help in data collection.

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Correspondence to Suzanne E. Welcome.

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Welcome, S.E., Chiarello, C., Halderman, L.K. et al. Lexical processing skill in college-age resilient readers. Read Writ 22, 353–371 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-008-9120-3

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