Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item HOW BILINGUALS' COMPREHENSION OF CODE-SWITCHES INFLUENCES ATTENTION AND MEMORY(2024) Salig, Lauren; Novick, Jared; Slevc, L. Robert; Neuroscience and Cognitive Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Bilinguals sometimes code-switch between their shared languages. While psycholinguistics research has focused on the challenges of comprehending code-switches compared to single-language utterances, bilinguals seem unhindered by code-switching in communication, suggesting benefits that offset the costs. I hypothesize that bilinguals orient their attention to speech content after hearing a code-switch because they draw a pragmatic inference about its meaning. This hypothesis is based on the pragmatic meaningfulness of code-switches, which speakers may use to emphasize information, signal their identity, or ease production difficulties, inter alia. By considering how code-switches may benefit listeners, this research attempts to better align our psycholinguistic understanding of code-switch processing with actual bilingual language use, while also inspiring future work to investigate how diverse language contexts may facilitate learning in educational settings. In this dissertation, I share the results of three pre-registered experiments with Spanish-English bilinguals that evaluate how hearing a code-switch affects attention and memory. Experiment 1a shows that code-switches increase bilinguals’ self-reported attention to speech content and improve memory for that information, compared to single-language equivalents. Experiment 1b demonstrates that this effect requires bilingual experience, as English-speaking monolinguals did not demonstrate increased attention upon hearing a code-switch. Experiment 2 attempts to replicate these results and establish the time course of the attentional effect using an EEG measure previously associated with attentional engagement (alpha power). However, I conclude that alpha power was not a valid measure of attention to speech content in this experiment. In Experiment 3, bilinguals again showed better memory for information heard in a code-switched context, with a larger benefit for those with more code-switching experience and when listeners believed the code-switches were natural (as opposed to inserted randomly, removing the element of speaker choice). This suggests that the memory benefit comes from drawing a pragmatic inference, which likely requires prior code-switching experience and a belief in code-switches’ communicative purpose. These experiments establish that bilingual listeners derive attentional and memory benefits from ecologically valid code-switches—challenging a simplistic interpretation of the traditional finding of “costs.” Further, these findings motivate future applied work assessing if/how code-switches might benefit learning in educational contexts.Item TEXT COMPREHENSION ACROSS PRINT AND AUDIO: A PERSON-CENTERED MIXED METHODS STUDY(2023) Singh, Anisha; Alexander, Patricia; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The use of the audio medium (e.g., audiobooks and podcasts) is proliferating in everyday and educational contexts. Yet, research investigating text processing in audio compared to the more commonly used print medium is limited in scope. Specifically, the research so far has majorly focused on younger learners or English language learners, narrative genre texts, operationalized comprehension as a unidimensional construct, and used variable-centered analytical techniques. The current mixed methods study aimed to explore text processing across print and audio by focusing on four interrelated dimensions—learner, text, task, and test. I used finite mixture modeling for the quantitative part of the study to identify meaningful reader and listener profiles. Following the identification and validation of profiles, students from the profiles were interviewed to complement and enhance the understanding of the groups. Specifically, the study aimed to investigate differences across the two mediums vis-à-vis learner characteristics, text and test processing behaviors, and comprehension outcomes. A further goal of the study was to identify meaningful and distinct reader and listener profiles by accounting for affective and behavioral variables, and validating the profiles on cognitive variables. Finally, the study aimed to build qualitatively rich descriptions of the quantitatively unearthed profile groups. To address these aims, undergraduate students (n =130) were recruited from human development courses. They completed measures related to self-efficacy and reported their reading and listening habits. Each participant’s screen was recorded as they processed text in print and audio. Text processing behaviors (e.g., scrolling, increasing playback speed) and off-task behaviors (e.g., eating, fidgeting) were coded. Learner-related, text processing, and task variables were used to find meaningful reader and listener profiles. The profiles were validated using prior topic knowledge and comprehension as covariate and outcome, respectively. Students belonging to each profile were invited for interviews (n = 10). The format was a cued retrospective interview, wherein video clips were used to prompt participants. The interviews were transcribed, segmented into utterances, and coded for learner-related, text-related, task-related, and test-related content. Results from the variable-centered analysis revealed that reading print or listening to audio led to similar performance levels on items targeting recall and inference. However, reading print was associated with higher scores on the item assessing the main idea than listening to audio. Results from the mixture modeling and interviews revealed three reader profiles—Distracted Surfers, Labored Harvesters, and Fluent Surveyors—and three listener profiles—Inconsistently Attentive, Inattentive, and Persistently Attentive. The profiles were found to differ qualitatively on strategies, text processing depth, and attention regulation. This study’s contribution is in expanding the research on comprehension across different mediums both in terms of scope and methodologically. The current investigation demonstrates that learner characteristics and text processing behaviors need to be accounted for when studying comprehension with different mediums. Practically, it has implications for practitioners looking to incorporate audio for content delivery in their courses and for instructional designers developing educational technology tools to optimize learning.Item The Role of Cognitive Control in Bilingual Code-Switch Comprehension(2021) Salig, Lauren; Novick, Jared; Neuroscience and Cognitive Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Bilinguals experience a conflict when comprehending a sentence that code-switches from one language to another. However, why bilinguals experience conflict during code-switch comprehension is unclear. This study asks: Does being in a cognitive state conducive to resolving conflict help bilinguals read code-switches faster? If so, it would indicate that comprehending a code-switch involves conflict at an early lexical/syntactic level because faster resolution of the conflict would facilitate faster code-switch reading. 101 Spanish-English bilinguals completed Flanker-arrow trials to manipulate their engagement of cognitive control—which regulates conflict detection and resolution. Immediately after this cognitive-control manipulation, bilinguals read code-switched or unilingual sentences. Having cognitive control engaged prior to encountering a code-switch did not result in faster reading of code-switches. This finding provides preliminary evidence that reading a code-switch may not involve conflict at a lexical/syntactic level. Future work should further investigate the type of conflict that bilinguals encounter during code-switch comprehension.Item Executive Function, Engagement, and Attention: Effects on Comprehension(2021) Mohan, Svetha; Bolger, Donald J; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Cognitive control/executive function (EF) and attention deficits are prevalent among students and impact comprehension performance. While EF and attention impairments are well-studied, the interaction between cognitive control/EF, attention, arousal/engagement, and comprehension has yet to be explored. Undergraduates’ ADHD symptoms, cognitive abilities, and cognitive control were assessed prior to listening to passages of varying degrees of emotional valence and responding to comprehension questions. Exploratory EEG data were also collected to examine patterns of cognitive engagement/emotional arousal. Results showed that comprehension for participants with high numbers of ADHD symptoms and/or proactive cognitive control types were influenced by the emotional valence of the context. In emotional contexts, those with high ADHD symptoms showed better comprehension overall and deep levels of processing, and those with proactive cognitive control types showed better deep processing. These findings indicate the need for further research to tease apart the interaction of EF, attention, and arousal on comprehension across different contexts.Item PANCAKES, DUCKLINGS, THINKING IN YOUR BRAIN: MANIFESTATIONS OF 4-YEAR-OLDS’ EMERGING METACOGNITION DURING JOINT PICTURE BOOK READING(2019) Faust, Brecca Berman; Afflerbach, Peter; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Developmental psychologist John Flavell (1979, 1981) used the term metacognition to encompass any form of thinking about one’s thinking. Flavell did not consider this second-level capacity to be a regular part of the thinking and learning of preschool children. However, research using developmentally-appropriate tasks, especially early literacy tasks, has suggested otherwise. Therefore, through this qualitative and exploratory study, I investigated whether and how seven 4-year-olds attending full-day preschool were metacognitive as they read narrative picture books with me in their classroom. Over the course of their pre-kindergarten school year, during free choice morning centers, I engaged the participants in three joint readings of commercially available, narrative picture books. Throughout the informal dialogue of each joint reading session, I posed questions meant to encourage metacognitive processing. I transcribed the dialogue from these sessions and coded each researcher and participant speech turn. I then utilized a constant-comparative process to analyze transcriptions throughout the data collection process while referring to Flavell’s (1979, 1981) conceptualization of metacognition and prior studies of metacognition with preschool participants. This process resulted in the articulation of seven categories of metacognition relevant to preschoolers’ joint reading processes: Feeling of Knowing Story Content, Judgment of Difficulty, Reflecting on Reading, Verbal Self-Revising, Expanding Storytelling, Task Planning, and Justifying Verbalizations. Participants engaged in a total of 219 instances of these forms of metacognition. Approximately 60% of these instances were prompted—occurring in response to a question that I posed within the joint reading dialogue. However, approximately 40% of recorded instances of metacognition occurred spontaneously. All seven participants were metacognitive in at least five of the seven categories, across all four books, and through both prompted and spontaneous verbalizations. Consistent with Flavell’s (1979) conceptualization, metacognition functioned as a transactionally-relevant resource for each joint reading participant, manifesting in ways that reflected varying efforts to participate in the task and construct meaning from the story. My results challenge the notion that metacognition has limited relevance before proficient or conventional print reading (Baker, 2005; Hacker, 1998; Pressley & Gaskins, 2006; Veenman, et al., 2006) and provide further support for Whitebread et al.’s (2009) conclusion that underappreciation of the metacognitive capabilities of preschoolers is becoming an “increasingly untenable” position (p. 64). Given my findings, I discuss implications for metacognitive theory and for future research on reading-relevant metacognition with preschool children.Item READING IN PRINT AND DIGITALLY: PROFILING AND INTERVENING IN UNDERGRADUATES’ MULTIMODAL TEXT PROCESSING, COMPREHENSION, AND CALIBRATION(2019) Singer Trakhman, Lauren Melissa; Alexander, Patricia A; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As a consequence of today’s rapid-paced society and ever-changing technologies, students are frequently called upon to process texts in print and digitally. Further, multimodal texts are standard in textbooks and foundational to learning. Nonetheless, little is understood about the effects of reading multimodal texts in print or digitally. In Study I, the students read weather and soil passages in print and digitally. These readings were taken from an introductory geology textbook that incorporated various graphic displays. While reading, novel data-gathering measures and procedures were used to capture real-time behaviors. As students read in print, their behaviors were recorded by a GoPro@ camera and tracked by the movement of a pen. When reading digitally, students’ actions were recorded by Camtasia@ Screen Capture software and by the movement of the screen cursor used to indicate their position in the text. After reading, students answered comprehension questions that differ in specificity (i.e., main idea to key concepts) that cover content from three sources: text only; visual only; and, both text and visual. Finally, after reading in each medium, undergraduates rated their performance on the comprehension measure on a scale of 0-100 for each passage. The accuracy of these ratings formed the basis of the calibration score. The processing data were analyzed using Latent Class Analysis. In Study II, an intervention aimed at improving students’ comprehension and calibration when reading digitally were introduced to participants from Study I who returned to the lab about two weeks later. Next, the undergraduates repeated the procedure for digital reading outlined in Study I with a passage on volcanoes. In Study I, students performed better when reading in print and spent more time with the text but were better calibrated when reading digitally. Three clusters were identified for the print data, and three clusters were identified for the digital data. Cluster movement across mediums suggests that some participants treat digital texts differently than when reading in print. After the intervention in Study II, comprehension scores and duration increased but calibration accuracy scores worsened. The LCA revealed three clusters, each showing improvement in processing behaviors, comprehension, or reading duration.Item Explicit Instruction on Rhetorical Patterns and Student-Constructed Graphic Organizers: The Impact on Sixth-Grade Students' Comprehension of Social Studies Text(2011) Scott, Deborah Beth; Dreher, Mariam J; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Using a pretest, posttest two group design, this study investigated the effect of explicit instruction on rhetorical patterns and using those patterns to represent the content graphically on sixth-grade students’ ability to comprehend social studies text. Students in 13 classes from four middle schools in Pennsylvania received either explicit instruction in identifying rhetorical patterns found in social studies textbooks and representing that text graphically or routine social studies instruction. Routine social studies instruction was identified as the instructional activities documented during observations conducted six weeks prior to the intervention. When the intervention began, intervention group students learned to identify rhetorical patterns, construct graphic organizers using the rhetorical patterns, and write summaries of textbook content. Comparison group students continued with routine social studies instruction. All students were assessed with (a) pre- and posttests in which they constructed graphic organizers and wrote summaries using social studies passages and (b) comprehension quizzes during on-going instruction. Randomly selected students from each group engaged in think-aloud tasks at the end of the study. The pre- and posttests results indicated a statistically significant interaction between time and group for both graphic organizer construction (with a very large effect size) and summary writing (with a moderate effect size). Intervention group students outperformed students in the routine social studies group in both constructing graphic organizers based on rhetorical patterns and writing complete summaries. For the comprehension quizzes, students receiving routine social studies instruction outperformed students in the intervention group when answering multiple-choice and essay questions requiring recall of content. Think-aloud responses demonstrated that students in the intervention group were able to graphically represent social studies textbook content using rhetorical patterns as well as transfer that knowledge to a textbook from a different domain while students in the comparison group recognized there was a structure to the content of the text but did not accurately represent that content graphically according to the appropriate rhetorical pattern. Observational data showed intervention students were more engaged with graphic organizers and work samples demonstrated they were able to identify key information in the text and represent it in graphic form.Item The predictive nature of language comprehension(2009) Lau, Ellen Frances; Phillips, Colin; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the hypothesis that predictive processing--the access and construction of internal representations in advance of the external input that supports them--plays a central role in language comprehension. Linguistic input is frequently noisy, variable, and rapid, but it is also subject to numerous constraints. Predictive processing could be a particularly useful approach in language comprehension, as predictions based on the constraints imposed by the prior context could allow computation to be speeded and noisy input to be disambiguated. Decades of previous research have demonstrated that the broader sentence context has an effect on how new input is processed, but less progress has been made in determining the mechanisms underlying such contextual effects. This dissertation is aimed at advancing this second goal, by using both behavioral and neurophysiological methods to motivate predictive or top-down interpretations of contextual effects and to test particular hypotheses about the nature of the predictive mechanisms in question. The first part of the dissertation focuses on the lexical-semantic predictions made possible by word and sentence contexts. MEG and fMRI experiments, in conjunction with a meta-analysis of the previous neuroimaging literature, support the claim that an ERP effect classically observed in response to contextual manipulations--the N400 effect--reflects facilitation in processing due to lexical-semantic predictions, and that these predictions are realized at least in part through top-down changes in activity in left posterior middle temporal cortex, the cortical region thought to represent lexical-semantic information in long-term memory,. The second part of the dissertation focuses on syntactic predictions. ERP and reaction time data suggest that the syntactic requirements of the prior context impacts processing of the current input very early, and that predicting the syntactic position in which the requirements can be fulfilled may allow the processor to avoid a retrieval mechanism that is prone to similarity-based interference errors. In sum, the results described here are consistent with the hypothesis that a significant amount of language comprehension takes place in advance of the external input, and suggest future avenues of investigation towards understanding the mechanisms that make this possible.Item The Effects of Using Mental Imagery as a Comprehension Strategy for Middle School Students Reading Science Expository Texts(2009) Jenkins, Margaret H.; Dreher, Mariam J; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study investigated the effects of mental imagery instruction using science expository texts on middle school students. Using a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design, four intact classes (56 students) were randomly assigned to either an experimental or comparison group. Students in the experimental group received instruction on mental imagery strategies while comparison group students received no mental imagery instruction. After the 2-week intervention, students took Posttest 1. The comparison group students then received mental imagery instruction. Throughout the rest of the school year, all students were prompted at least two to three times a week to use mental imagery strategies. At the end of the school year, all participants took Posttest 2. Results indicated that there was a statistically significant interaction of time and group for the selected response (SR) portion of expository science text comprehension measure. Both groups appeared to make gains between Posttest 1 and Posttest 2, once both had received mental imagery instruction. The comparison group, which by chance included stronger readers, outperformed the experimental group. There were no statistically significant differences on the brief constructed response (BCR) measure. Analysis of the performance of low-, middle-, and high-comprehenders revealed statistically significant main effects for time and for type of comprehender on the SR portion of the comprehension task. While all students appeared to make gains between Posttest 1 and 2, the high- and middle-comprehenders consistently outperformed the low-comprehenders. For the BCR, there were no statistically significant effects of time or interaction; however, there was a statistically significant effect for type of comprehender. Pearson's product moment correlations revealed a statistically significant positive relation between vividness of mental imagery and motivation to read for middle-comprehenders and a statistically significant negative correlation between comprehension and vividness of mental imagery for high-comprehenders. Both experimental and comparison groups showed no statistically significant difference in motivation to read before and after mental imagery intervention. These results suggest that middle school students may benefit from mental imagery strategies when reading science expository texts. It is recommended that these strategies be used as a continuous effort in the classroom rather than a short term "quick-fix."Item Picturebooks as Visual Literacy: The Influence of Illustrations on Second-Graders' Comprehension of Narrative Text(2008) Gerrard, Emily Elizabeth; O'Flahavan, John F; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study poses the following research question: "How does change in text type as text contains more illustrations and fewer words influence second-graders' comprehension of narrative text?" Eleven second-graders read three texts each and completed a series of oral reading comprehension tasks. The three text types varied in terms of the proportion of words to illustrations available in the text: written-only text, combination of written and illustrated text, and illustration-only text. The researcher interviewed each participant three times, once for each text type. Participant scores from the retelling and comprehension questions portion of the interview were analyzed in addition to participant's responses to the retrospective think aloud portion of the interview. Quantitative results from the retellings and comprehension questions suggest an overall trend indicating that illustrations have a positive effect on second grader's comprehension. Qualitative data for individual participants from their retrospective think alouds confirm this trend.