Many middle-school students struggle with basic reading skills. One reason for this might be a lack of automaticity in word-level lexical processes. To investigate this, we used a novel backward masking paradigm, in which a written word is either covered with a mask or not. Participants (N = 444 [after exclusions]; nfemale = 264, nmale = 180) were average to struggling middle-school students from an urban area in Eastern Iowa that were all native speakers of English and were roughly equally from grades 6, 7, and 8 (average age: 13 years). Two-hundred-fifty-five students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, a proxy for economic disadvantage. Participants completed different masked and unmasked task versions where they read a word and selected a response (e.g., a pictured referent). This was related to standardized measures of decoding, fluency, and reading comprehension. Decoding was uniquely predicted by knowledge (unmasked performance), whereas fluency was uniquely predicted by automaticity (masked performance). Automaticity was stable across two testing points. Thus, automaticity should be considered an individually reliable marker/reading trait that uniquely predicts some skills in average to struggling middle-school students. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

---

自动性作为预测中学阅读结果的独立特征。

许多中学生在基本的阅读技能上都遇到了困难。造成这种情况的一个原因可能是词级词汇过程缺乏自动化。为了研究这一点，我们使用了一种新颖的反向掩蔽范式，其中书面文字要么被掩码覆盖，要么不被掩码覆盖。参与者（N = 444 [排除后]；nfemale = 264，nmale = 180）平均为来自爱荷华州东部城市地区的苦苦挣扎的中学生，他们都是以英语为母语的人，并且在 6、7、和 8 岁（平均年龄：13 岁）。255 名学生有资格获得免费或减价午餐，这是经济劣势的代表。参与者完成了不同的蒙面和未蒙面任务版本，他们在其中阅读一个单词并选择一个响应（例如，图片中的所指对象）。这与解码的标准化措施有关，流利度和阅读理解力。解码是由知识唯一预测的（未屏蔽性能），而流畅性是由自动性（屏蔽性能）唯一预测的。两个测试点的自动化程度是稳定的。因此，自动化应该被认为是一种个人可靠的标记/阅读特征，它可以独特地预测一些平均水平对苦苦挣扎的中学生的技能。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2021 APA，保留所有权利）。