Use of Contextual Information and Prediction by Struggling Adult Readers: Evidence From Reading Times and Event-Related Potentials

ABSTRACT

We employed self-paced reading and event-related potential measures to investigate how adults of varying literacy levels use sentence context information when reading. Community-dwelling participants read strongly and weakly constraining sentences that ended with expected or unexpected target words. Skilled readers showed N400s that were graded by the cloze probability of the targets, with larger N400s for more unexpected words. Moreover, it took these participants longer to read unexpected targets in strongly than weakly constraining sentences, suggesting a processing cost for revising predictions. Among less skilled readers, a reliable N400 difference was found between expected and unexpected targets only for the strongly constraining sentences. They also took longer when targets were unexpected, regardless of the context. These findings suggest that lower literacy readers could only immediately take advantage of strongly constraining context information to facilitate word processing and that they do not make as much use of predictive processing during comprehension.

Funding

We are grateful for support from the Department of Education’s Institute of Educational Sciences, grant R305A130448, to Elizabeth A. L. Stine-Morrow and Kara D. Federmeier.

Notes

¹ Participants in our studies are routinely administered a comprehensive battery of neuropsychological assessments including measures of fluid and crystallized abilities, as well as more specific language and reading-related abilities. In the larger sample of participants (N = 232) from which the current sample was drawn, Cronbach’s α = .76. Furthermore, factor analysis on this battery showed that these three measures loaded onto a common factor, one that was separate from fluid and crystallized abilities.

² Theoretically, cloze could also be treated as a continuous variable. However, by design, the cloze of our materials tended to cluster at three levels of probability (high, mid-to-low, and very low), making it more like a categorical rather than a continuous variable.

³ The frontal negativity shows up for moderately expected words and in particular under circumstances when people seem to be using the incoming information to “fill in” or “update” aspects of the mental model that were not clear, for example, where there are multiple possible interpretations: “They used the fertilizer to enrich the …” soil is most expected but grass is a secondary competitor, and they entail somewhat different mental models (farming vs. lawn care).

Additional information

Funding

We are grateful for support from the Department of Education’s Institute of Educational Sciences, grant R305A130448, to Elizabeth A. L. Stine-Morrow and Kara D. Federmeier.