Project Activities
Structured Abstract
Setting
Sample
Research design and methods
Control condition
Key measures
Data analytic strategy
People and institutions involved
IES program contact(s)
Products and publications
ERIC Citations: Find available citations in ERIC for this award here.
Select Publications
Journal articles
Ng, S., Payne, B.R., Steen, A.A., Stine-Morrow, E.A.L., & Federmeier, K.D. (2017). Use of contextual information and prediction by struggling adult readers: evidence from reading times and event-related potentials. Scientific Studies of Reading, 21, 359-375. Full text
Ng, S., Payne, B. R., Stine-Morrow, E. A. L., & Federmeier, K. D. (2018). How struggling adult readers use contextual information when comprehending speech: evidence from event-related potentials. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 125, 1-9. Full text
Steen-Baker, A.A., Ng, S., Payne, B.R., Anderson, C.J., Federmeier, K.D., & Stine-Morrow, E. A.L. (2017). The effects of context on processing words during sentence reading among adults varying in age and literacy skill. Psychology and Aging, 32, 460-472. Full text.
Stine-Morrow, E.A., Hussey, E.K., & Ng, S. (2015). The potential for literacy to shape lifelong cognitive health. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2 (1): 92-100. Full text.
Ng, S., Payne, B. R., Liu, X., Anderson, C. J., Federmeier, K. D., & Stine-Morrow, E. A. (2020). Execution of lexical and conceptual processes in sentence comprehension among adult readers as a function of literacy skill. Scientific Studies of Reading, 24(4), 338-355.
Supplemental information
Co-Principal Investigator: Federmeier, Kara
Key findings: The main findings of this project are as follows:
- Adults with lower levels of literacy skill showed poorer sentence memory, may be more sensitive to word-level features, and do not demonstrate longer sentence-final word processing ("wrap up"), which has been argued to reflect conceptual integration processing (Ng et al., 2020).
- Regardless of literacy level, readers with better overall sentence memory engaged in a reading strategy marked by a larger sentence wrap-up effect (Ng et al., 2020).
- Regardless of reading skill, older readers are more sensitive to context for meaning-integration processes, but adults with lower reading skills (regardless of age) depend more on a constrained semantic representation for comprehension (Steen-Baker et al., 2017).
- Eye-tracking data indicate that adults with low literacy skills and those with intact literacy skills use sentence context similarly, though those with lower skills have overall slower reading times (Steen-Baker et al., 2017).
- When processing spoken English, adults with underdeveloped literacy skills may be less likely to engage predictive processing, suggesting that the basic mechanisms of language comprehension may be recruited differently as a function of literacy development (Ng et al., 2018).
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