Stella Marianna, Engelhardt Paul E
School of Psychology, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.
Dyslexia. 2019 May;25(2):115-141. doi: 10.1002/dys.1613. Epub 2019 Apr 16.
This study examined eye movements and comprehension of temporary syntactic ambiguities in individuals with dyslexia, as few studies have focused on sentence-level comprehension in dyslexia. We tested 50 participants with dyslexia and 50 typically developing controls, in order to investigate (a) whether dyslexics have difficulty revising temporary syntactic misinterpretations and (b) underlying cognitive factors (i.e., working memory and processing speed) associated with eye movement differences and comprehension failures. In the sentence comprehension task, participants read subordinate-main structures that were either ambiguous or unambiguous, and we also manipulated the type of verb contained in the subordinate clause (i.e., reflexive or optionally transitive). Results showed a main effect of group on comprehension, in which individuals with dyslexia showed poorer comprehension than typically developing readers. In addition, participants with dyslexia showed longer total reading times on the disambiguating region of syntactically ambiguous sentences. With respect to cognitive factors, working memory was more associated with group differences than was processing speed. Conclusions focus on sentence-level syntactic processing issues in dyslexia (a previously under-researched area) and the relationship between online and offline measures of syntactic ambiguity resolution.
由于很少有研究关注阅读障碍患者的句子层面理解，本研究考察了阅读障碍患者对临时句法歧义的眼动情况及理解。我们测试了50名阅读障碍患者和50名发育正常的对照者，以调查：（a）阅读障碍患者在修正临时句法误解方面是否存在困难；（b）与眼动差异和理解失败相关的潜在认知因素（即工作记忆和处理速度）。在句子理解任务中，参与者阅读有歧义或无歧义的主从结构句子，我们还操纵了从句中所含动词的类型（即反身动词或可选及物动词）。结果显示，组别对理解有主效应，阅读障碍患者的理解能力比发育正常的读者差。此外，阅读障碍患者在句法歧义句子的歧义消解区域的总阅读时间更长。关于认知因素，工作记忆比处理速度与组别差异的关联更大。结论聚焦于阅读障碍中句子层面的句法处理问题（一个此前研究较少的领域）以及句法歧义消解的在线和离线测量之间的关系。
