Incremental Comprehension during First and Second Language Reading of Authentic Texts Assessed through Statistical Models, ERPs, and Behavioral Measures

Many children and adults struggle to comprehend what they read, which interferes with academic success, professional development, and engagement with society. This project seeks to understand the specific reading comprehension challenges faced by adult learners when English is not their native language. The research strategy is to identify the factors that affect incremental reading comprehension – comprehension that builds as words are recognized, understood, and connected to what has already been read.

The project assesses the relative contributions of word-based factors in reading comprehension (such as their familiarity and their meaning), sentence-based factors (such as their structure and grammatical form) and the interaction of factors (e.g., how predictable the word is in particular sentence contexts). Adult learners read authentic texts for which statistical language models have assessed the grammatical, lexical, and predictive properties.

The investigators collect behavioral measures (e.g., the time taken to read each word) and electrophysiological measures (event-related potentials) to determine 1) whether English sentence structure contributes more to reading comprehension of non-native speakers learning to read English than to native English speakers' comprehension and 2) whether the role of sentence structure in reading comprehension of non-native learners depends, in part, on the similarity between the native and non-native grammars. The work has the potential to elucidate critical issues in reading that have major implications for education, and in particular for children with dyslexia and other learning disabilities.

This project is funded by the Perception, Action, and Cognition Program with co-funding from the EHR Core Research Program.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.