Evidence for Semantic Facilitation in Resilient, But Not Poor, Readers Suzanne Welcome and Christine Chiarello University of California, Riverside Introduction Acknowledgment This research was supported by NIDCD grant 5R01DC6957. Case studies suggest that poor phonological processing skills do not necessarily lead to poor word reading or reading comprehension in adults (Stothard, Snowling & Hulme, 1996; Holmes & Standish, 1996; Howard & Best, 1997). Resilient readers show large discrepancy between their phonological decoding abilities and text comprehension skills. One potential form of compensation is reliance on orthographic processing: Individuals with poor phonological skills but good comprehension showed faster RT in spelling task (Holmes & Standish, 1996) and responded more quickly to irregular words than to regular words (Howard & Best, 1997) Alternately, these readers could rely more heavily on word meaning information Younger and poorer readers benefit more from presentation of a word or a pseudohomophone (like BRANE) in the context of a meaningful sentence than older and more skilled readers (Nation & Snowling, 1998) An individual with good comprehension/poor phonological processing showed large improvements in pseudohomophone reading when items were primed by related words (TOMATO- SAWCE) (Stothard et al., 1996) Resilient readers show deficits in phonological tasks equivalent to deficits shown by poor readers Impaired phoneme awareness and verbal working memory No evidence for superior orthographic analysis skills among resilient readers Equivalent performance to poor readers on orthographic choice and no evidence for differential use of orthographic analogy Resilient readers may rely more on word meanings to guide word recognition. Word meanings appear to be activated to a greater extent in resilient readers than poor readers Good knowledge and use of word meaning information may allow some individuals to compensate for poor phonological decoding. Consistent with Interactive Compensatory Model (Stanovich, 1980), which holds that greater reliance on semantic factors like context can compensate for deficiencies in lower-level processes Proficient Readers Resilient Readers Poor Readers Group Differences Word Attack622021Res/Poor < Pro Passage Comp Poor < Res/Pro Word Identification614026Poor < Res < Pro Verbal IQ Poor < Res/Pro Performance IQ NS Proficient Readers Resilient Readers Poor Readers Group Differences Phoneme Deletion80.1%66.7%67.8%Res/Poor < Pro Sentence Span Res/Poor < Pro Pseudoword Reading Acc86.5%65.0%71.0%Res/Poor < Pro Pseudoword Reading RT679 ms771 ms939 msPro < Poor Orthographic Choice Acc86.5%81.3%79.3%Res/Poor < Pro Orthographic Choice RT1456 ms1635 ms1495 msNS Semantic Priming Acc0.2%2.4%0.4%NS Semantic Priming RT34 ms70 ms27 msRes > Poor/Pro Method Results Conclusions PARTICIPANTS 22 Proficient Readers, 21 Resilient Readers, 12 Poor Readers years of age 28 male (11 proficient, 13 resilient, 4 poor) 6 non right-handed (2 proficient, 3 resilient, 1 poor) TASKS Phoneme Deletion - delete first/last sound from spoken pseudoword Verbal working memory - sentence span Pseudoword reading - percent of correct responses to ambiguous items (e.g., VUTH) Orthographic Choice - select correct spelling Semantic Priming - benefit in lexical decision performance for related over unrelated word pairs References Holmes V.M., Standish J.M. (1996) Skilled reading with impaired phonology: A case study. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 13(8), Howard D., Best W. (1997) Impaired non-word reading with normal word reading: A case study. Journal of Research in Reading, 20(1), Nation K., Snowling, M.J. (1998) Individual differences in contextual facilitation: Evidence from dyslexia and poor reading comprehension. Child Development, 69(4), Stanovich, K.E. (1980) Toward an interactive-compensatory model of individual differences in the development of reading fluency. Research Reading Quarterly, 16(1), Stothard S.E., Snowling M.J., Hulme C. (1996) Deficits in phonology but not dyslexic? Cognitive Neuropsychology, 13(5),