An Individual Differences Examination of the Relation between Reading Processes and Comprehension.

Previous research has generally focused on understanding individual variation in either on-line processing or off-line comprehension even though some theories explicitly link difficulty in processing to comprehension problems. The goal of the current study was to examine individual variation in performance both during on-line and off-line reading measures. A battery of psycholinguistic and cognitive tests was administered to community college and university students.

The use of context in resolving syntactic ambiguity: Structural and semantic influences.

Verb bias facilitates parsing of temporarily ambiguous sentences, but it is unclear when and how comprehenders use probabilistic knowledge about the combinatorial properties of verbs in context. In a self-paced reading experiment, participants read direct object/sentential complement sentences. Reading time in the critical region was investigated as a function of three forms of bias: structural bias (the frequency with which a verb appears in direct object/sentential complement sentences), lexical bias (the simple co-occurrence of verbs and other lexical items), and global bias (obtained from norming data about the use of verbs with specific noun phrases).

Adaptation to Animacy Violations during Listening Comprehension.

The goal of this study was to examine adaptation to various types of animacy violations in cartoon-like stories. We measured the event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by words at the beginning, middle, and end of four-sentence stories in order to examine adaptation over time to conflicts between stored word knowledge and context-derived meaning (specifically, to inanimate objects serving as main characters, as they might in a cartoon). The fourth and final sentence of each story contained a predicate that required either an animate or an inanimate subject.

Comprehension in Proficient Readers: The Nature of Individual Variation.

Individual-difference research on reading comprehension is challenging because reader characteristics are as correlated with each other as they are with comprehension. This study was conducted to determine which abilities are central to explaining comprehension and which are secondary to other abilities. A battery of psycholinguistic and cognitive tests was administered to community college and university students.

Responding to a Community's Concern: A Comparison of Breast Cancer Characteristics and Initial Treatment in Three Selected North Carolina Counties.

A 2007 national report identified North Carolina's Edgecombe County as having among the highest breast cancer incidence and mortality rates nationally, motivating the initiation of a task force and other local efforts to address the problem. The goal of this study is to examine county breast cancer characteristics before and after the report, including whether geographic variation may mask racial disparities in this majority African American community. With guidance from community partners, breast cancer cases from 2000 to 2012 in Edgecombe, Nash, and Orange Counties (N = 2,641) were obtained from the North Carolina Central Cancer Registry.

Language context processing deficits in schizophrenia: The role of attentional engagement.

Individuals with schizophrenia exhibit problems in language comprehension that are most evident during discourse processing. We hypothesized that deficits in cognitive control contribute to these comprehension deficits during discourse processing, and investigated the underlying cognitive-neural mechanisms using EEG (alpha power) and ERPs (N400). N400 amplitudes to globally supported or unsupported target words near the end of stories were used to index sensitivity to previous context.

Word-Decoding Skill Interacts With Working Memory Capacity to Influence Inference Generation During Reading.

The aim of this study was to examine predictions derived from a proposal about the relation between word-decoding skill and working memory capacity, called verbal efficiency theory. The theory states that poor word representations and slow decoding processes consume resources in working memory that would otherwise be used to execute high-level comprehension processes, such as the generation of inferences. Previous research has yielded inconsistent findings about the importance of word decoding in adult readers, and the hypothesis has never been tested experimentally.

Factors associated with the successful removal of indwelling urinary catheters post-operatively in the fragility hip fracture patient.

Introduction: Patients presenting to hospital with a fragility hip fracture are routinely catheterized in the emergency department. Studies have found that the duration of catheterization is the greatest and most important risk factor for developing a urinary tract infection. Whilst there is a considerable body of evidence around correct techniques for insertion of urinary catheters, there appears to be little evidence as to the timing of their removal.

Developing and Implementing a Citywide Asthma Action Plan: A Community Collaborative Partnership.

Objectives: Asthma affects 1 in 10 children in the United States, with higher prevalence among children living in poverty. Organizations in San Antonio, Texas, partnered to design and implement a uniform, citywide asthma action plan to improve asthma management capacity in schools.

Methods: The asthma action plan template was modified from that of the Global Initiative for Asthma.

Cognitive Control of Episodic Memory in Schizophrenia: Differential Role of Dorsolateral and Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex.

Background: Dorsal (DLPFC) and ventral (VLPFC) subregions in lateral prefrontal cortex play distinct roles in episodic memory, and both are implicated in schizophrenia. We test the hypothesis that schizophrenia differentially impairs DLPFC versus VLPFC control of episodic encoding.

Methods: Cognitive control was manipulated by requiring participants to encode targets and avoid encoding non-targets based upon stimulus properties of test stimuli.

Sensitivity to Referential Ambiguity in Discourse: The Role of Attention, Working Memory, and Verbal Ability.

The establishment of reference is essential to language comprehension. The goal of this study was to examine listeners' sensitivity to referential ambiguity as a function of individual variation in attention, working memory capacity, and verbal ability. Participants listened to stories in which two entities were introduced that were either very similar (e.

Graded expectations: Predictive processing and the adjustment of expectations during spoken language comprehension.

The goal of this study was to investigate the use of the local and global contexts for incoming words during listening comprehension. Local context was manipulated by presenting a target noun (e.g.

Evaluating a community-partnered cancer clinical trials pilot intervention with African American communities.

Cancer clinical trial (CCT) accrual and retention rates remain disproportionately low among African Americans. Awarenesss and access to trials are crucial facilitators of trial participation. Strategies developed within a community-based participatory framework (CBPR) are potential solutions to increase awareness and access to CCTs.

Collaborative development of clinical trials education programs for African-American community-based organizations.

This paper describes the use of a unique "Learning and Feedbackˮ approach to customize cancer clinical trials education programs for Community Bridges, a peer training intervention designed for African-American communities in North Carolina. Generic community education modules were demonstrated with key community leaders who were designated as trainers. Quantitative and qualitative assessments were provided on understanding of content, comfort with material, and cultural relevance.

Memory availability and referential access.

Most theories of coreference specify linguistic factors that modulate antecedent accessibility in memory; however, whether non-linguistic factors also affect coreferential access is unknown. Here we examined the impact of a non-linguistic generation task (letter transposition) on the , a processing difficulty observed when coreferential repeated names refer to syntactically prominent (and thus more accessible) antecedents. In Experiment 1, generation improved online (event-related potentials) and offline (recognition memory) accessibility of names in word lists.

Spared and impaired spoken discourse processing in schizophrenia: effects of local and global language context.

Individuals with schizophrenia are impaired in a broad range of cognitive functions, including impairments in the controlled maintenance of context-relevant information. In this study, we used ERPs in human subjects to examine whether impairments in the controlled maintenance of spoken discourse context in schizophrenia lead to overreliance on local associations among the meanings of individual words. Healthy controls (n = 22) and patients (n = 22) listened to short stories in which we manipulated global discourse congruence and local priming.

The effects of two health information texts on patient recognition memory: a randomized controlled trial.

Objective: To compare the effects of two health information texts on patient recognition memory, a key aspect of comprehension.

Methods: Randomized controlled trial (N=60), comparing the effects of experimental and control colorectal cancer (CRC) screening texts on recognition memory, measured using a statement recognition test, accounting for response bias (score range -0.91 to 5.

Modeling Reader- and Text- Interactions During Narrative Comprehension: A Test of the Lexical Quality Hypothesis.

The goal of this study was to examine predictions derived from the Lexical Quality Hypothesis (Perfetti & Hart, 2002; Perfetti, 2007) regarding relations among word-decoding, working-memory capacity, and the ability to integrate new concepts into a developing discourse representation. Hierarchical Linear Modeling was used to quantify the effects of two text properties (length and number of new concepts) on reading times of focal and spillover sentences, with variance in those effects estimated as a function of individual difference factors (decoding, vocabulary, print exposure, and working-memory capacity). The analysis revealed complex, cross-level interactions that complement the Lexical Quality Hypothesis.

Effects of working memory span on processing of lexical associations and congruence in spoken discourse.

The goal of this study was to determine whether variability in working memory (WM) capacity and cognitive control affects the processing of global discourse congruence and local associations among words when participants listened to short discourse passages. The final, critical word of each passage was either associated or unassociated with a preceding prime word (e.g.

Hemispheric differences in the organization of memory for text ideas.

The goal of this study was to examine hemispheric asymmetries in episodic memory for discourse. Access to previously comprehended information is essential for mapping incoming information to representations of "who did what to whom" in memory. An item-priming-in-recognition paradigm was used to examine differences in how the hemispheres represent discourse.

Does Discourse Congruence Influence Spoken Language Comprehension before Lexical Association? Evidence from Event-Related Potentials.

The goal of this study was to examine how lexical association and discourse congruence affect the time course of processing incoming words in spoken discourse. In an ERP norming study, we presented prime-target pairs in the absence of a sentence context to obtain a baseline measure of lexical priming. We observed a typical N400 effect when participants heard critical associated and unassociated target words in word pairs.

Cognitive control influences the use of meaning relations during spoken sentence comprehension.

The aim of this study was to investigate individual differences in the influence of lexical association on word recognition during auditory sentence processing. Lexical associations among individual words (e.g.

Will working memory training generalize to improve off-task behavior in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder?

Computerized working memory and executive function training programs designed to target specific impairments in executive functioning are becoming increasingly available, yet how well these programs generalize to improve functional deficits in disorders, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), beyond the training context is not well-established. The aim of this study was to examine the extent to which working memory (WM) training in children with ADHD would diminish a core dysfunctional behavior associated with the disorder, "off-task" behavior during academic task performance. The effect of computerized WM training (adaptive) was compared to a placebo condition (nonadaptive) in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled design in 26 children (18 males; age, 7 to 14 years old) diagnosed with ADHD.

A community-academic partnership to plan and implement an evidence-based lay health advisor program for promoting breast cancer screening.

Despite a growing body of evidence concerning effective approaches to increasing breast cancer screening, the gap between research and practice continues. The North Carolina Breast Cancer Screening Program (NC-BCSP) is an example of an evidence-based intervention that uses trained lay health advisors (LHA) to promote breast cancer screening. Partnerships that link academic researchers knowledgeable about specific evidence-based programs with community-based practitioners offer a model for increasing their use.

Individual Differences in Eye-Movements During Reading: Working Memory and Speed-of-Processing Effects.

Theories of eye-movement control in reading should ultimately describe how differences in knowledge and cognitive abilities affect reading and comprehension. Current mathematical models of eye-movement control do not yet incorporate individual differences as a source of variation in reading, although developmental and group-difference effects have been studied. These models nonetheless provide an excellent foundation for describing and explaining how and why patterns of eye-movements differ across readers (e.