Eye Movements of Deaf Students in Expository Versus Narrative Texts.

Text comprehension, a daily academic activity in primary and secondary school, is especially challenging for deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) students. The present study analyzed the effect of text genre (narrative vs. expository) on accuracy and eye-movement patterns during text comprehension by DHH students (ages 9-15 years) when compared to a typically hearing (TH) control group matched for chronological age. Comprehension accuracy was found to be similar across text genres for both groups, though TH participants outperformed DHH participants. Regarding eye movements, both groups spent more time and made more regressive fixations in the expository text than in the narrative text, but DHH participants showed longer saccade amplitude in the expository than in the narrative, which could be interpreted as indicating better self-regulation of DHH readers in the easiest and more familiar narrative text structure.

Brief report: Autistic students read between lines.

Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) tend to struggle with reading comprehension, often resulting in difficulties with inference generation. While most of the previous research has focused on the product of comprehension, we report a preliminary validation of an experimental reading task in English to measure, by means of eye-movements, the time course of generating consistent and inconsistent inferences during reading. The task was tested with a group of 12 students with ASD (age range: 10-15) who showed accuracy differences between inference and control conditions. Participants spent longer reading in the inconsistent than control condition regarding go past times and second pass times and made more regressions into the target and post-target regions, but these differences were not significant.

Video-blogs and linguistic simplification for students with intellectual disability.

BACKGROUND: The Internet provides individuals with intellectual disability with access to information and participation in a broader society, but it also presents risks when content is difficult to comprehend. This study aimed to test whether students with intellectual disability enhanced their comprehension of online blogs as a function of the format (text vs. video) and linguistic simplification. METHOD: Young students with intellectual disability read or watched text and video-blog posts about environment, health, society, and technology in their original version or a linguistically simplified/easy-to-read version. Then, they completed tests that assessed their reading processing (e.g., calibration) and comprehension of blog content. RESULTS: Participants predicted that they would correctly answer 80% of the comprehension questions, but their average comprehension of the blog posts was 55%, regardless of the condition. Previous levels of students' reading comprehension skills predicted their blog comprehension scores and interacted with format and simplification. Those participants with higher reading comprehension skills learned more from non-simplified than from simplified blog posts while those with lower levels of reading comprehension skills did not benefit from linguistic simplification nor video-blog format although the difference with regard to higher comprehenders was lower in the video and simplified conditions. CONCLUSIONS: Improving reading comprehension abilities of students with intellectual disability is essential to prevent the digital divide while linguistic simplification is not a useful accommodation and even counterproductive for higher reading comprehenders.

Beyond the Educational Context: Relevance of Intrinsic Reading Motivation During COVID-19 Confinement in Spain.

What role could have intrinsic motivation toward reading in an extraordinary situation like the recent confinement? This research examines the relationship between intrinsic reading motivation (IRM) and reading habits in an adult population considering types of reading (for leisure, work/study, social networks, and news), gender, and distress generated by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Participants were 3,849 adults from Spain who were surveyed about their reading practices: before, during the first weeks, and after several weeks of confinement. Linear mixed effects models (LMMs) were used to analyze data. Results showed a three-way interaction between reading frequency, IRM, and type of reading. Also, distress seems to pose a differential impact depending on the type of reading. The higher the IRM, the lesser the time devoted to study/work reading and the more to social and news reading (at the beginning of confinement). In this sense, IRM can function as a protective factor of reading behavior but only for leisure reading. Results support previous findings of the importance of consciously promoting this type of motivation in all individuals beyond educational contexts, since it seems to be positively related to well-being. Other results and implications are discussed.

Did the three little pigs frighten the wolf? How deaf readers use lexical and syntactic cues to comprehend sentences.

BACKGROUND: The ways in which students with deafness process syntactic and semantic cues while reading sentences are unclear. While some studies have supported the preference for semantic cues, others have not. AIM: To examine differences in the processing of syntactic versus semantic cues during sentence reading among students who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH). METHOD: Twenty DHH students (mean age = 12.48 years) and 20 chronologically age-matched students with typical hearing (TH) were asked to read sentences written in Spanish with different grammatical structures and to choose the picture that best matched the sentences' meaning while their eye movements were being registered. The picture options were manipulated so that, in addition to the correct ones, there were lexical distractors and syntactic distractors. RESULTS: The TH participants outperformed the DHH participants in reading complex sentences but not simple sentences in the active voice. In the correctly answered trials, both groups fixated longer and made more fixations on the target than on the syntactic distractor than on the lexical distractor. DHH participants made significantly longer fixations on the lexical distractions. CONCLUSIONS: Our results did not support a strict preference for either lexical or semantic cues in the DHH participants.

Time-Course of Grammatical Processing in Deaf Readers: An Eye-Movement Study.

Twenty participants who were deaf and 20 chronological age-matched participants with typical hearing (TH) (mean age: 12 years) were asked to judge the correctness of written sentences with or without a grammatically incongruent word while their eye movements were registered. TH participants outperformed deaf participants in grammaticality judgment accuracy. For both groups, First Pass and Total Fixation Times of target words in correct trials were significantly longer in the incongruent condition than in the congruent one. However, whereas TH students showed longer First Pass in the target area than deaf students across congruity conditions, deaf students made more fixations than their TH controls. Syntactic skills, vocabulary, and word reading speeds (measured with additional tests) were significantly lower in deaf students but only syntactic skills were systematically associated to the time-course of congruity processing. These results suggest that syntactic skills could have a cascading effect in sentence processing for deaf readers.

Training young adults with intellectual disability to read critically on the internet.

BACKGROUND: Young people with intellectual disability (ID) are becoming frequent Internet users, but they present difficulties selecting reliable Internet sources. METHODS: The present authors tested an instructional programme aimed at increasing skills to evaluate information from the Internet of 33 young adult students with intellectual disability enrolled in special needs education (19.4 years). The programme was composed of different web pages that provided conflicting views on a controversial topic. Students participated in small group discussions supported with Wh-question graphic organizers and contrasting cases during seven sessions. RESULTS: Differences between pre- and post-tests indicated that the programme is effective in increasing students' ability to select trustworthy web pages, and to use source characteristics to justify such selection by means of supervised instruction. CONCLUSION: Promoting Internet use in a safe way might increase the opportunities of young people with intellectual disability to make choices and self-determined decisions about their life (Handbook of research-based practices for educating students with intellectual disability, 2016, New York, NY: Taylor & Francis).

¿Son realmente tan buenos los nativos digitales? Relación entre las habilidades digitales y la lectura digital / Are really digital natives so good? Relationship between digital skills and digital reading

La competencia en la lectura digital consiste en la comprensión, uso, reflexión y disfrute de los textos escritos con el fin de conseguir nuestros objetivos, desarrollar nuestro conocimiento y potencial, y participar en nuestra sociedad. En la actualidad se considera que los "nativos digitales", aquellos estudiantes que desde la infancia han crecido rodeados de las tecnologías de la información, poseen las habilidades digitales básicas (usar el ratón, el navegador, …) necesarias para desarrollar la competencia en la lectura digital. En el presente estudio ponemos a prueba esta visión, a partir de un estudio en el que estudiantes de 5º de Primaria y 3º de Secundaria realizaron una serie de tareas de lectura digital. Los estudiantes completaron asimismo varias pruebas objetivas para medir sus habilidades digitales básicas, así como si nivel de competencia lectora en papel. Los resultados mostraron que los estudiantes no sólo presentaban dificultades en numerosas habilidades digitales básicas, si no que éstas estaban relacionadas directamente con el éxito en tareas de lectura digital. Para concluir, se reflexiona sobre la necesidad de considerar la instrucción en las habilidades digitales básicas como parte de los esfuerzos actuales por mejorar la competencia en la lectura digital

Digital reading literacy consists on the comprehension, use, reflection and enjoyment of written texts with the aim to fulfill our goals, to develop our knowledge and potential, and to participate in our society. Currently it is considered that "digital natives", i.e. those students that have been raised surrounded by information technologies, poses the basic digital skills (such as using the mouse, the browser, …) required to develop digital reading skills. The present study tested this assumption, by means of a study in which students of 5th level of primary education and 3rd level of secondary education performed a series of digital reading tasks. In addition, students completed several objective tasks to measure their basic reading skills, and their printed reading comprehension. The results revealed that the groups assessed had difficulties in several basic digital skills, and that those skills are directly related to success rate in digital reading tasks. A regression analysis revealed that this relationship was independent of students' printed reading skills, as well as of students‟ navigation during the digital reading tasks. To conclude, we reflected on the need to consider the instruction of basic reading skills as part of the current efforts to improve digital reading literacy

Who do you refer to? How young students with mild intellectual disability confront anaphoric ambiguities in texts and sentences.

Along 2 experiments we tested the anaphoric pronoun resolution abilities of readers with intellectual disability in comparison with chronological and reading age-matched groups. In Experiment 1, the anaphor test of Elosúa, Carriedo, and García-Madruga (2009) confirmed that readers with intellectual disability (ID) are slower than control readers resolving clitic anaphoric pronouns, especially when the use of morphological cues (e.g. gender) is necessary. In order to test if the poor performance could be due to low levels of metacognitive skills during reading, an inconsistency detection task combined with eye tracking was designed in Experiment 2. Participants read short texts with an anaphoric pronoun in the fifth sentence, either morphologically (gender) consistent or not with the information provided in the second sentence. The scores in the anaphor comprehension questions presented after the text confirmed that readers with ID are affected by the gender inconsistency but they are unable to explicitly report it and recover from it, as the number of re-fixations after reading the critical sentence suggests. As their answers to the explicit detection questions showed, the adults control group did not show any preference for morphosyntax or semantics in spite of being aware of the inconsistency. In sum, both groups of readers with and without ID are affected by inconsistencies, but ID readers do not have appropriate metacognitive skills to explicitly identify the source of the inconsistency and fix it.

Easy-to-read texts for students with intellectual disability: linguistic factors affecting comprehension.

BACKGROUND: The use of 'easy-to-read' materials for people with intellectual disabilities has become very widespread but their effectiveness has scarcely been evaluated. In this study, the framework provided by Kintsch's Construction-Integration Model (1988) is used to examine (i) the reading comprehension levels of different passages of the Spanish text that have been designed following easy-to-read guidelines and (ii) the relationships between reading comprehension (literal and inferential) and various linguistic features of these texts. METHOD: Sixteen students with mild intellectual disability and low levels of reading skills were asked to read easy-to-read texts and then complete a reading comprehension test. The corpus of texts was composed of a set of forty-eight pieces of news selected from www.noticiasfacil.es, a Spanish digital newspaper that publishes daily journalistic texts following international guidelines for the design of easy-to-read documents (IFLA, Tronbacke B. (1997) Guidelines for Easy-to-read Materials. IFLA, The Hague). RESULTS: Participants correctly answered 80% of the comprehension questions, showing significantly higher scores for literal questions than for inferential questions. The analyses of the texts' linguistic features revealed that the number of coreferences was the variable that best predicted literal comprehension, but contrary to what the previous literature seemed to indicate, the relationship between the two variables was inverse. In the case of inferential comprehension, the number of sentences was a significant negative predictor; that is, the higher the sentence density, the lower the ability of these students to find relationships between them. The effects of the rest of linguistic variables, such as word frequency and word length, on comprehension were null. CONCLUSIONS: These results provide preliminary empirical support for the use of easy-to-read texts but bring into question the validity of some popular design guidelines (e.g. augmenting word frequency) to optimally match texts and reading levels of students with intellectual disability. Two factors are suggested as contributing to the effect of sentence density on inferential comprehension: (i) long texts present higher conceptual density, so there are more ideas to store, retrieve and integrate, which increases the demand on inferential reasoning and (ii) long texts are perceived as difficult, which affects reading motivation and, consequently, induces passive reading strategies. The need for further research to elucidate the origin of our main findings with a larger and more heterogeneous sample of students with intellectual disability is highlighted.

Towards text simplification for poor readers with intellectual disability: when do connectives enhance text cohesion?

Cohesive elements of texts such as connectives (e.g., but, in contrast) are expected to facilitate inferential comprehension in poor readers. Two experiments tested this prediction in poor readers with intellectual disability (ID) by: (a) comparing literal and inferential text comprehension of texts with and without connectives and/or high frequency content words (Experiment 1) and (b) exploring the effects of type and familiarity of connectives on two-clause text comprehension by means of a cloze task (Experiment 2). Neither the addition of high frequency content words nor connectives in general produced inferential comprehension improvements. However, although readers with ID were less likely to select the target connective in the cloze task than chronologically age-matched readers (mean age=21 years) in general, their performance was affected by the type of connective and its familiarity. Familiarity had a facilitative effect for additive and contrastive connectives, but interfered in the case of temporal and causal connectives. The average performance of a reading level-matched control group (typically developing children) was similar to the group of readers with ID although the pattern of interaction between familiarity and type of connectives varied between groups. The implications of these findings for the adaptation of texts in special education contexts are discussed.

Do sign language videos improve Web navigation for Deaf Signer users?

The efficacy of video-based sign language (SL) navigation aids to improve Web search for Deaf Signers was tested by two experiments. Experiment 1 compared 2 navigation aids based on text hyperlinks linked to embedded SL videos, which differed in the spatial contiguity between the text hyperlink and SL video (contiguous vs. distant). Deaf Signers' performance was similar in Web search using both aids, but a positive correlation between their word categorization abilities and search efficiency appeared in the distant condition. In Experiment 2, the contiguous condition was compared with a text-only hyperlink condition. Deaf Signers became less disorientated (used shorter paths to find the target) in the text plus SL condition than in the text-only condition. In addition, the positive correlation between word categorization abilities and search only appeared in the text-only condition. These findings suggest that SL videos added to text hyperlinks improve Web search efficiency for Deaf Signers.

Hyperlink format, categorization abilities and memory span as contributors to deaf users hypertext access.

Sixty deaf and hearing students were asked to search for goods in a Hypertext Supermarket with either graphical or textual links of high typicality, frequency, and familiarity. Additionally, they performed a picture and word categorization task and two working memory span tasks (spatial and verbal). Results showed that deaf students were faster in graphical than in verbal hypertext when the number of visited pages per search trial was blocked. Regardless of stimuli format, accuracy differences between groups did not appear, although deaf students were slower than hearing students in both Web search and categorization tasks (graphical or verbal). No relation between the two tasks was found. Correlation analyses showed that deaf students with higher spatial span were faster in graphical Web search, but no correlations emerged between verbal span and verbal Web search. A hypothesis of different strategies used by the two groups for searching information in hypertext is formulated. It is suggested that deaf users use a visual-matching strategy more than a semantic approach to make navigation decisions.

Propiedades psicométrica de la versión española del Cuestionario de modelos implícitos de enfermedad. (Implicit Models of Illness Questionnaire) para enfermedades físicas y mentales / Psychometric properties of the Spanish version of the Implicit Models of Illness Questionnaire for physical and mental diseases

El objetivo de este estudio fue comprobar las propiedades psicométricas de la versión española del Implicit Models of Illness Questionnaire (Turk et al., 1986), el Cuestionario de Creencias sobre la Enfermedad (CCSE; Van der Hofstadt y Rodríguez-Marín, 1997), para cinco enfermedades físicas y mentales: depresión, esquizofrenia, cáncer, hipertensión y gripe. 348 personas (62,6% mujeres) con distinta experiencia con estas enfermedades (haber padecido o no la enfermedad, haber convivido o no con una persona diagnosticada de esta enfermedad) respondieron el CCSE para dichas enfermedades. Se encontró que las propiedades psicométricas de la escala son apropiadas. Las dimensiones (factores) identificadas son: Identidad, controlabilidad personal, síntomas, consecuencias y cura/evolución. La fiabilidad de la escala y sus subescalas es apropiada. La escala muestra una buena validez de constructo, al obtenerse resultados muy similares para las cinco enfermedades. Todo ello se muestra en consonancia con los resultados informados previamente por Turk et al. (1986), y no tanto con los encontrados por van der Hofstadt y Rodríguez- Marín (1997). Sin embargo, algunos ítems podrían ser revisado o eliminados con el fin de mejorar las características del instrumento. Como conclusión, siendo tan importante como es que los profesionales de la salud conozcan las creencias personales de sus pacientes y de los individuos sanos respectos a la salud y la enfermedad para adecuar sus actuaciones promotoras, preventivas o clínicas (tratamiento/rehabilitación), los resultados de este estudio señalan que esta escala puede ayudarles a tal fin, tanto en el caso de enfermedades físicas como mentales

The goal of this study was to establish the psychometric properties of the Spanish version of the Implicit Models of Illness Questionnaire (Turk et al., 1986), the Cuestionario de Creencias sobre la Enfermedad (CCSE; van der Hofstandt an Rodríguez-Marín, 1997), for five physical and mental disease: depression, schizophrenia, cancer, hypertension, and influenza. 348 individuals (62,6% women) with different experience with these diseases (having/not having suffered form the disease, having/not having lived with someone with such diagnosis ) answered the CCSE for those illnesses. Psychometric properties of the scale were found to be appropriate. The obtained dimensions (factors) are: identity, personal control, symptoms, consequences and cure/time-line. The scale and subscales reliability is appropriate. The scale shows suitable construct validity, since similar results have been obtained for the diseases included. Our results are consonant with those informed by Turk et al. (1986), differing with those obtained by van der Hofstadt and Rodríguez- Marín (1997). Nevertheless, some items might be revised or eliminated in order to improve the properties of the scale. Since the knowledge of patients´ and healthy people´s personal beliefs may result so valuable for health professionals, in order to adequate their promotion and prevention strategies and clinical (treatment/rehabilitation) interventions, the results of this study show that this scale may help them for this purpose, in the case of both physical and mental diseases

Cognitive flexibility and adaptability to environmental changes in dynamic complex problem-solving tasks.

People who show good performance in dynamic complex problem-solving tasks can also make errors. Theories of human error fail to fully explain when and why good performers err. Some theories would predict that these errors are to some extent the consequence of the difficulties that people have in adapting to new and unexpected environmental conditions. However, such theories cannot explain why some new conditions lead to error, while others do not. There are also some theories that defend the notion that good performers are more cognitively flexible and better able to adapt to new environmental conditions. However, the fact is that they sometimes make errors when they face those new conditions. This paper describes one experiment and a research methodology designed to test the hypothesis that when people use a problem-solving strategy, their performance is only affected by those conditions which are relevant to that particular strategy. This hypothesis is derived from theories that explain human performance based on the interaction between cognitive mechanisms and environment.