Landi, Nicole
(2005)
BEHAVIORAL AND ELECTROPHYSIOLOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS OF SEMANTIC PROCESSING IN SKILLED AND LESS-SKILLED COMPREHENDERS.
Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh.
(Unpublished)
Abstract
Theorists of reading comprehension failure are split between two groups: those that posit low-level word reading skills and phonological awareness as underlying factors of poor comprehension ability and those that consider poor comprehension as partially independent of these low-level skills. Several studies with children have now demonstrated that poor comprehenders with adequate decoding skills make up a small but significant proportion of poor readers. One promising hypothesis posits that semantic processing deficits underlie these children's comprehension difficulties. This hypothesis was supported by findings that demonstrated less-skilled comprehenders to show poorer than average performance on a variety of semantic tasks. In order to test whether these findings would generalize to adult poor comprehenders, we evaluated the dissociability of high-level and low-level skills in adults. In addition, we evaluated whether adult less-skilled comprehenders (with adequate decoding abilities) have semantic processing difficulties. A PCA compared the reading skills of large group of college aged readers and found that high level skills such as reading comprehension and vocabulary were partly dissociable from low-level reading skills such as decoding ability. Furthermore, in order to evaluate the semantic processing deficit hypothesis, adult skilled and less-skilled comprehenders were compared on several behavioral and electrophysiological tests of semantic and phonological processing. The findings from these studies revealed that less-skilled comprehenders generated fewer semantic associates in a verbal fluency task and showed reduced categorical priming in an automatic semantic priming task. Additionally, electrophysiological records of less-skilled comprehenders differed from skilled readers during a semantic processing task but no during a phonological processing task. Taken together these findings provide evidence that supports semantic knowledge/semantic processing differences between skilled and less-skilled comprehenders. Implications of these findings are discussed within the construct of an experience based model of semantic knowledge acquisition.
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Details
| Item Type: |
University of Pittsburgh ETD
|
| Status: |
Unpublished |
| Creators/Authors: |
|
| ETD Committee: |
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| Date: |
5 October 2005 |
| Date Type: |
Completion |
| Defense Date: |
5 August 2005 |
| Approval Date: |
5 October 2005 |
| Submission Date: |
18 August 2005 |
| Access Restriction: |
No restriction; Release the ETD for access worldwide immediately. |
| Institution: |
University of Pittsburgh |
| Schools and Programs: |
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences > Psychology |
| Degree: |
PhD - Doctor of Philosophy |
| Thesis Type: |
Doctoral Dissertation |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: |
Comprehension; Reading; Semantics |
| Other ID: |
http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-08182005-133452/, etd-08182005-133452 |
| Date Deposited: |
10 Nov 2011 20:00 |
| Last Modified: |
15 Nov 2016 13:49 |
| URI: |
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/9175 |
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