Orthographic processing and procedural learning in adults with developmentaldyslexia:

Dr. Katerina Lukasova- Universidade Federal do ABC

the integrated use of fMRI and Eye tracking.

Successful comprehension of written language requires the ability to build connections between incoming words and previous sentences and paragraphs. This could take the form of integration— that is, mapping new words into predictive processing. In turn, mapping or anticipating new words requires access to a representation of preceding text. Thus, the quality of text representation or situation model that readers maintain in memory is critical for these processes. We hypothesize that the situation model is determined at least in part by the readers’ lexical knowledge. To test this hypothesis, we investigated the interaction between vocabulary and the use of linguistic context during reading in a number of self-paced reading studies. Two experiments explored the relation between lexical knowledge and the capacity for integrating words across sentence boundaries as a function of the previous content. Two further experiments, looked at the effects of sentential context on predictive language processing both at the sentence level, and across sentence boundaries. Our results suggest an important role of vocabulary for the integration of words to preceding text, however, they challenge the notion of predictive processing as essential mechanism for comprehension during reading. These results will be discuss in the context existing models of reading comprehension and recent hypotheses about the lexical representation and their role for reading comprehension.