Joke City and beyond: supporting comprehension improvement through language, gesture and jokes

1. Joke City and beyond: supporting comprehension improvement through language, gesture and jokes Nicola Yuill Psychology/Cognitive Science University of Sussex nicolay@sussex.ac.uk www.riddles.sussex.ac.uk

2. Plan of talk • Causes of poor comprehension • Metalinguistic awareness • Aims of intervention • Joke City study • Language and comprehension gain • Gesture and comprehension gain • Conclusions and questions

3. Poor comprehension 15% of 580 7-9yr olds had comprehension ages 6-24 mo below reading age Scores Vocab: choose 1 of 4 words to match a picture Neale Accuracy: read words in stories Neale Comprehension answer questions about the stories

4. Poor reading comprehension: causes • Poor working memory: simultaneous storage and processing e.g. mental arithmetic • Poor inferential skill: John took 5 books. How many books? John pedalled over the bridge. How did John travel? • Poor ‘language awareness’: distinguishing form and meaning, knowing how you know (Yuill & Oakhill, 1992)

5. Language awareness Treating text as interpreted: Poor comprehenders: • define reading in terms of decoding (best reader = read hardest words) • have difficulty with deductive inference: How do you know that x....? • have poor understanding of jokes that play on meaning (but not that play on sound)

6. Not just a memory problem… Knowing how to use knowledge • Cain & Oakhill (1999) Stories: ‘They set off for home, pedalling as fast as they could.’ Questions: How did they travel home? Poor comprehenders 53% correct Prompts: If incorrect: • look at story again -> 68% • E directs child to relevant part of text ->85% • Clue: What sort of things can we pedal? ->100%

7. Ambiguity resolution problems 48 children, 7-9yrs, varying in comprehension skill: ‘Look at that bat’ (choose 2 of 4 pictures) ‘The man said the duck was ready to eat.’ What could it mean? What else could it mean? (TLC, Wiig, 1998) Comprehension skill predicts ambiguity score, r(46) = .46, p<.001 (w/o acc and age)

8. Understanding communication Ambiguous message game (Robinsons, 1978) X tells Y: ‘Pick the man with the flag’ Did X tell Y properly? What should X have said? Comprehension skill predicts message judgement score r(33) = .49, p<.001 (w/o accuracy and age) Children with comprehension age under 8;5 scored 6/8 or less

9. Jokes (BAHLAS:Yuill & George, 2000) 50 jokes playing on meanings: choose correct punchline Why did the leopard never escape from the zoo? Because it was always spotted/Because it ran too slowly Tested on 300 children yrs 3-6 Good reliability (.83) and good prediction of comprehension independently of accuracy (r over .6) (No relation of comprehension and jokes playing on sound: What room can’t you go into? A mushroom) BAHLAS Riddles scores

10. Language awareness and comprehension • Poor sensitivity to meaning • Poor understanding of communication • Poor understanding of meaning ambiguity • Poor understanding of jokes

11. Aims of intervention: Questions • Practice: benefits to children, esp. given the neglect of comprehension • Process: theoretical understanding of comprehension processes. Children lack x, train x, does comprehension improve? • Relation of intervention to normal comprehension processes: what should the control conditions be? Why don’t some children develop x naturally? Is x a piece of knowledge or an attitude to reading?

12. Comprehension training • Some training is very reflective, teaching explicit and metacognitive knowledge and strategies (e.g. Paris) • Some work assumes implicit (not directly trainable?) processes (e.g. Gernsbacher, inhibition) • MLA seems amenable to training to improve comprehension • By encouraging children to have an interrogative attitude to text –how? Make it problematic…

13. MLA training can work: • 1 session of training children to search for ‘clue’ words in deliberately ambiguous texts brings significant comprehension increase on similar texts. (Yuill & Joscelyne 1988) • 7 30-minute group sessions, riddle training vs ‘funny stories’. Significant comprehension increase for riddle group on standardised test. (Yuill, 1998) • 3 25-minute sessions with Joke City software: explaining jokes, requiring children to articulate ambiguity and alternate interpretations of text, sig. better on Neale compr. than control no treatment. (Yuill & Bradwell, 1998)

14. Comprehension skills improve after discussing ambiguity in joking riddles • 12 pairs of 7- to 9-year-old children (same sex, one good + one poor) • 3 sessions Joke City software • 24 control children (no treatment) • Transcribed videos of sessions 1 and 3 of 3 x 25-minute sessions for 12 pairs • Standardised comprehension test pre- and post-training (2 parallel forms of Neale) pre- to post-training changes (months) in accuracy and comprehension scores Individual differences!

15. Looking at process: Joke City in more detail • Do children whose comprehension improves talk about different things from children who don’t improve? • Does what children talk about change across the training sessions? • Do any changes across sessions relate to how much children improve in comprehension? (so is metalinguistic awareness an engine for change?) • Does this restaurant serve fish? • Yes, what would you like to eat, Mr Fish?

16. Coding scheme (Yuill & George 2006) • Metacognitive: self, other or joint knowledge or ignorance, thinking aloud Aah, I get it! I don’t understand. Do you know? We did it right. • Metalinguistic: defining cued or uncued meaning, or both, metalinguistic play and exploration Does this restaurant serve fish?’ –‘Yes, what do you want to eat, Mr Fish?’ ‘serve’: cued meaning = object which is served, uncued meaning = agent to whom food is served. Cued AND uncued at once: I get it! Cos they serve fish on a plate and they serve fish to the fish. • Control: task management, responses to control: Your turn to read • Reading from screen Does this restaurant serve fish? Reliability over 90%

17. High improvers made more metalinguistic comments than medium or low improvers in Session 3 Interaction of group x session, p<.05. Mean no. of utterances combining cued and uncued meanings in s3: Hi: 1.25, med: 1.0, lo: 0.13 (lo) Comprehension change and metalinguistic comments r (21) = .49, p<.02 Low improvers made more metacognitive comments Number of utterances in each talk category Sig. interaction group x talk category, p<.001, mcog higher for low than med or hi

18. Examples of cued/uncued comments • spotted ‘cos leopards they have spots and it’s cos they get spotted’ (= seen) • serve fish ‘he’s a fish and he likes to eat fish’ • bed socks ‘you wear them to bed and the bed’s wearing them’ • pinch ‘you can pinch someone on the leg or you can pinch sweets without paying’ • roll ‘you can roll a sausage roll’ Hard to articulate…. Other ways to express?

19. What about gestures? • Gestures seem to indicate concepts on the brink of a child’s understanding (Goldin-Meadow, Pine) • Mismatches: children who express one idea in speech and another in gesture are more likely to improve on balance beam task than gesture-speech matchers (Pine et al., 2004) • Gestures show the listener what the actor understands • Perhaps gestures help a child’s own understanding • Language ambiguity seems to be a prime example where gestures might be used before speech

20. Method of coding gestures for Joke City • Collected all clips containing gestures (N=100) • Gestures coded as referring to cued (obvious) or uncued (non-obvious) meaning of the joke: • How do you make a sausage roll? Push it down a hill?’ roll = ‘pastry’ = cued, ‘rotate’ = uncued • Usually clear: adults can recognise which meaning, without sound • Number of cued and uncued gestures (counting repeated gestures once only)

21. Gestures: examples

22. Associations of gestures and comprehension measures • Tot. no. gestures and pre-test reading comprehension r(20) = .61 cued, .58 uncued (r accuracy both <.2, n.s., vocab r .2-.4, n.s., semantic fluency n.s.) • Gestures and ambiguous word test, r(20) = .51 (cued), .61 (uncued) • Gestures and metalinguistic utterances No relation of gestures to other talk categories, or to improvement

23. Book plug… .