ABSTRACT

Previous research has generally focused on understanding individual variation in either on-line processing or off-line comprehension even though some theories explicitly link difficulty in processing to comprehension problems. The goal of the current study was to examine individual variation in performance both during on-line and off-line reading measures. A battery of psycholinguistic and cognitive tests was administered to community college and university students. In addition, participants read texts in an eye-tracker and answered comprehension questions about them. Multi-level modeling was used to determine the individual-difference factors that modulated the relation between word-level characteristics (e.g., length, frequency, surprisal) and fixation durations. The analyses showed that language experience, decoding, and WMC interacted with word characteristics to influence fixation durations, whereas language experience and reasoning predicted comprehension. The results suggest that individual variation in processing does not map directly to variation in comprehension as some theories predict.

摘要

先前的研究通常侧重于理解在线处理或离线理解中的个体差异，尽管一些理论明确地将处理困难与理解问题联系起来。当前研究的目标是检查在线和离线阅读测量期间表现的个体差异。对社区学院和大学生进行了一系列心理语言学和认知测试。此外，参与者在眼动仪中阅读文本并回答有关它们的理解问题。多层次建模用于确定调节词层次特征（例如，长度、频率、惊奇）和注视持续时间之间的关系的个体差异因素。分析表明，语言体验、解码、WMC 与单词特征相互作用以影响注视持续时间，而语言经验和推理预测理解。结果表明，处理过程中的个体差异并不像一些理论预测的那样直接映射到理解能力的差异。