engleski

Methodological issues in studying online processing of anaphora in LI children

Reading comprehension can be defined as complex process of integration of lexical features (word forms and meanings), word recognition skills, reading fluency, syntactic processing, inference generation, comprehension monitoring, etc. (Cain & Oakhill, 2006 ; Perfetti, 2007 ; Language and Reading Research Consortium & Logan, 2017). To build a meaningful representation of a written word, sentence or a text, component skills of lower- and higher-level language processing must be activated. It is commonly thought that these processing components are defined depending on the level of processing on which they are activated during text comprehension: word, sentence or a discourse level (Daneman, 1996 ; Perfetti, 2001 ; Rayner & Reichle, 2010). Having in mind this complex nature of language comprehension, it is not surprising that there is a population of children with language impairment (LI) who are struggling with extracting information given in the written form, integrating it with previous knowledge and understanding what they read (Yuill & Oakhill, 1991 ; Oakhill, 1994 ; Bishop & Snowling, 2004). With respect to the previous studies that provided data about individual differences between skilled and less skilled comprehenders, there is still a need for specifying the exact source of these differences. Naturally, text paragraphs or larger discourse units are reduced of repetition in order to increase text cohesion. Therefore, understanding sentences commonly depends on interpretation of the previous ones. Anaphora is a major linguistic tool used to maintain cohesion within and between sentences (Ehrlich & Remond, 1997) and processing such complex, yet common syntactic structures may be demanding. By studying the processes that underlie resolving anaphoric structures, researchers could gain insights into the interactions of various anaphoric markers and comprehension skills, and disentangle the potential source of specific processing difficulties. Most researchers in the field of written text comprehension processes have relied mostly on off-line experimental methods. However, they do not give us specific data about when the comprehension failure happens and what is in its background. On the other hand, on-line experimental methods, specifically eye-tracking, stand out as objective, naturalistic, highly informative methods that provide valuable and reliable data about multi-level comprehension processes (Staub & Rayner, 2007). As is the case with any experimental method, the use of eye- tracking and the gathered eye movement data open up many questions related to the conceptual, empirical and practical issues in this research field (Rayner & Carroll, 1984 ; Rayner et al., 2006). In order to use eye tracking with the purpose of gathering reliable and valid data about specific difficulties in anaphora processing in children with LI, several methodological issues have to be discussed. These will be briefly presented during CLEAR.

Anaphora ; Language Impairment ; Eyetracking ; Methodology

nije evidentirano