Introduction

1. Evidence for Semantic Facilitation in Resilient, But Not Poor, ReadersSuzanne Welcome andChristine ChiarelloUniversity of California, Riverside Introduction Conclusions • Case studies suggest that poor phonological processing skills do not necessarily lead to poor word reading or reading comprehension in adults (Stothard, Snowling & Hulme, 1996; Holmes & Standish, 1996; Howard & Best, 1997). • Resilient readers show large discrepancy between their phonological decoding abilities and text comprehension skills. • One potential form of compensation is reliance on orthographic processing: • Individuals with poor phonological skills but good comprehension showed faster RT in spelling task (Holmes & Standish, 1996) and responded more quickly to irregular words than to regular words (Howard & Best, 1997) • Alternately, these readers could rely more heavily on word meaning information • Younger and poorer readers benefit more from presentation of a word or a pseudohomophone (like BRANE) in the context of a meaningful sentence than older and more skilled readers (Nation & Snowling, 1998) • An individual with good comprehension/poor phonological processing showed large improvements in pseudohomophone reading when items were primed by related words (TOMATO- SAWCE) (Stothard et al., 1996) Resilient readers show deficits in phonological tasks equivalent to deficits shown by poor readers • Impaired phoneme awareness and verbal working memory No evidence for superior orthographic analysis skills among resilient readers • Equivalent performance to poor readers on orthographic choice and no evidence for differential use of orthographic analogy Resilient readers may rely more on word meanings to guide word recognition. • Word meanings appear to be activated to a greater extent in resilient readers than poor readers Good knowledge and use of word meaning information may allow some individuals to compensate for poor phonological decoding. • Consistent with Interactive Compensatory Model (Stanovich, 1980), which holds that greater reliance on semantic factors like context can compensate for deficiencies in lower-level processes Results References Method • PARTICIPANTS • 22 Proficient Readers, 21 Resilient Readers, 12 Poor Readers • 18-34 years of age • 28 male (11 proficient, 13 resilient, 4 poor) • 6 non right-handed (2 proficient, 3 resilient, 1 poor) • TASKS • Phoneme Deletion - delete first/last sound from spoken pseudoword • Verbal working memory - sentence span • Pseudoword reading - percent of correct responses to ambiguous items (e.g., VUTH) • Orthographic Choice - select correct spelling • Semantic Priming - benefit in lexical decision performance for related over unrelated word pairs • Holmes V.M., Standish J.M. (1996) Skilled reading with impaired • phonology: A case study. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 13(8), 1207- • 1222. • Howard D., Best W. (1997) Impaired non-word reading with normal • word reading: A case study. Journal of Research in Reading, 20(1), • 55-65. • Nation K., Snowling, M.J. (1998) Individual differences in contextual • facilitation: Evidence from dyslexia and poor reading comprehension. • Child Development, 69(4), 996-1011. • Stanovich, K.E. (1980) Toward an interactive-compensatory model of • individual differences in the development of reading fluency. Research • Reading Quarterly, 16(1), 32-6. • Stothard S.E., Snowling M.J., Hulme C. (1996) Deficits in phonology but • not dyslexic? Cognitive Neuropsychology, 13(5), 641-672. Acknowledgment This research was supported by NIDCD grant 5R01DC6957.