Browsing by Author "Johns, Clint L."

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    Low working memory capacity is only spuriously related to poor reading comprehension
    (Elsevier, 2014-06) Van Dyke, Julie A.; Johns, Clint L.; Kukona, Anuenue
    Accounts of comprehension failure, whether in the case of readers with poor skill or when syntactic complexity is high, have overwhelmingly implicated working memory capacity as the key causal factor. However, extant research suggests that this position is not well supported by evidence on the span of active memory during online sentence processing, nor is it well motivated by models that make explicit claims about the memory mechanisms that support language processing. The current study suggests that sensitivity to interference from similar items in memory may provide a better explanation of comprehension failure. Through administration of a comprehensive skill battery, we found that the previously observed association of working memory with comprehension is likely due to the collinearity of working memory with many other reading-related skills, especially IQ. In analyses which removed variance shared with IQ, we found that receptive vocabulary knowledge was the only significant predictor of comprehension performance in our task out of a battery of 24 skill measures. In addition, receptive vocabulary and non-verbal memory for serial order—but not simple verbal memory or working memory—were the only predictors of reading times in the region where interference had its primary affect. We interpret these results in light of a model that emphasizes retrieval interference and the quality of lexical representations as key determinants of successful comprehension.
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    Phonological instability in young adult poor readers: Time course measures and computational modeling
    (Paul Brookes Publishing, 2011) Magnuson, James S.; Kukona, Anuenue; Braze, David; Johns, Clint L.; Van Dyke, Julie A.; Tabor, Whitney; Mencl, W. Eainer; Pugh, Kenneth R.; Shankweiler, Donald P.
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    The real-time prediction and inhibition of linguistic outcomes: Effects of language and literacy skill
    (Elsevier, 2016-10-07) Kukona, Anuenue; Braze, David; Johns, Clint L.; Mencl, W. Einar; Van Dyke, Julie A.; Magnuson, James S.; Pugh, Kenneth R.; Shankweiler, Donald P.; Tabor, Whitney
    Recent studies have found considerable individual variation in language comprehenders’ predictive behaviors, as revealed by their anticipatory eye movements during language comprehension. The current study investigated the relationship between these predictive behaviors and the language and literacy skills of a diverse, community-based sample of young adults. We found that rapid automatized naming (RAN) was a key determinant of comprehenders’ prediction ability (e.g., as reflected in predictive eye movements to a WHITE CAKE on hearing “The boy will eat the white…”). Simultaneously, comprehension-based measures predicted participants’ ability to inhibit eye movements to objects that shared features with predictable referents but were implausible completions (e.g., as reflected in eye movements to a white but inedible WHITE CAR). These findings suggest that the excitatory and inhibitory mechanisms that support prediction during language processing are closely linked with specific cognitive abilities that support literacy. We show that a self-organizing cognitive architecture captures this pattern of results.