Publications from 1990-1999

Booth JR, MacWhinney B, Thulborn KR, Sacco K, Voyvodic J & Feldman HM (1999). Functional organization of activation patterns in children: Whole brain fMRI imaging during three different cognitive tasks. Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry, 23, 669-682. [pdf]

Examined issues of plasticity and localization in a study in which patterns of brain activation were measured with whole brain echo-planar functional magnetic resonance imaging at 3.0 Tesla in 6 healthy children, aged 9-12 yrs, and in a 12-yr-old with a left-hemisphere encephalomalacic lesion as sequellae from early strokes. Three cognitive tasks were used: auditory sentence comprehension, verb generation to line drawing and mental rotation of alphanumeric stimuli. There was evidence for significant bilateral activation in all three cognitive tasks for the healthy children. Their patterns of activation were consistent with previous functional imaging studies with adults (e.g., B. Alivisatos and M. Petrides, 1997). The child with the left-hemisphere stroke showed evidence of homologous organization in the nondamaged hemispbere.

Booth JR, Perfetti CA & MacWhinney B (1999). Quick, automatic, and general activation of orthographic and phonological representations in young readers. Developmental Psychology, 35, 3-19. [pdf]

Second through 6th graders were presented with nonword primes (orthographic, pseudohomophone, and control) and target words displayed for durations (30 and 60 ms) that were brief enough to prevent complete processing. Word reading skills were assessed by 3 word and nonword naming tasks. Good readers exhibited more orthographic priming than poor readers at both durations and more pseudohomophone priming at the short duration only. This suggests that good readers activate letter and phonemic information more efficiently than poor readers. Good readers also exhibited an equal amount of priming at both durations, whereas poor readers showed greater priming at the longer duration. This suggests that activation was not under strategic control. Finally, priming was reliable for both high- and low-frequency targets. This suggests that readers activate consistent information regardless of target word characteristics. Thus, quick, automatic, and general activation of orthographic and phonological information in skilled readers results from the precision and redundancy of their lexical representations.

Epelboim J, Booth JR, Ashkenazy R, Taleghani A & Steinman RM (1997). Fillers and spaces in text: Evidence for the importance of word recognition during reading. Vision Research, 37, 2899-2914. [pdf]

Skilled readers read continuous stories aloud and silently. Three factors were varied: (1) position of the fillers in the text (at the beginning, the end, or surrounding each word); (2) the presence or absence of spaces in the text; and (3) the effect of the type of filler on word recognition (from greatest effect to least effect: Latin letters, Greek letters, digits and shaded boxes). The effect of fillers on reading depended more on the type of filler than on the presence of spaces. The greater effect the fillers had on word recognition, the more they slowed reading. Surrounding each word with digits or Greek letters slowed reading as much as filling spaces with these symbols. Surrounding each word with randomly chosen letters, while preserving spaces, slowed reading by 44-75%, as much as, or more than, removing spaces from normal text. Removing spaces from text with Latin-letter fillers slowed reading by only 10-20% more. It is concluded that fillers in text disrupt reading by affecting word recognition directly, without necessarily affecting the eye movement pattern.

Booth JR, Hall WS, Robison GC & Kim SY (1997). Acquisition of mental state verbs by 2- to 5-year-old children. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 26, 581-603. [pdf]

Examined the production of the cognitive internal state word know by 4 2-5 yr old children and their parents. The levels of meaning of cognitive words can be categorized hierarchically along the dimensions of conceptual difficulty and abstractedness. Results indicate that children and their parents expressed low levels of meaning less frequently, whereas they expressed high levels of meaning more frequently as a function of age. The children's use of know was also correlated positively with (1) their number of different words produced, suggesting that cognitive words are related to more general semantic processes, and (2) with parental use of those same cognitive words, suggesting that parental linguistic input may be an important mechanism in cognitive word acquisition. Finally, young children tended to use know more to refer to themselves than to refer to others, whereas their parents tended to use know equally to refer to self and others.

Epelboim J, Booth JR & Steinman RM (1996). Much ado about nothing: The place of space in text. Vision Research, 36, 465-470. [pdf]

Responds to comments by K. Rayner and A. Pollatsek (1996) concerning the J. Epelboim et al (1994) argument that unspaced text is relatively easy to read. The conclusion of Rayner and Pollatsek that spaces between words constitute the primary cue used to guide saccadic eye movements during reading and that, in the absence of spaces, readers resort to a different and less effective oculomotor strategy is argued to be incorrect. The data of Epelboim et al indicate that the targets for reading saccades are the words themselves rather than peripheral groups of unprocessed letters delimited by spaces. The study of Epelboim et al was novel in that it used a unique and exceptionally accurate and precise eye movement monitor to examine both global and local characteristics of Ss' eye movements as they read.

Booth JR & Hall WS (1995). Development of the understanding of the polysemous mental state verb "know". Cognitive Development, 10, 529-549. [pdf]

Investigated 19 3-, 21 6-, 25 9-, and 17 12-yr-olds' understanding of different levels of meaning of the cognitive verb know as defined by the W. S. Hall et al (see PA, Vol 75:26120) abstractness and conceptual difficulty hierarchy. Cognitive verb knowledge (CVK) increased with development, and certain low levels of meaning were mastered before certain high levels of meaning irrespective of the medium of presentation (video-taped skits or audio-taped stories). However, Ss developed an understanding of low levels of meaning (LOM) at a more rapid rate than understanding of high LOM. This resulted in a more differentiated and hierarchical CVK in older Ss. The audio-taped stories were more difficult than the video-taped skits, and both tasks were significantly correlated with a standardized vocabulary measure for all ages except the 3-yr-olds. The implications of this study and others for a model of the cognitive-verb lexicon are discussed.

Booth JR & Hall WS (1994). Role of the cognitive internal state lexicon in reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 86, 413-422. [pdf]

Cognitive internal state words (e.g., think and know) may be central to accessing, monitoring, and transforming our internal states, processes that seem to be critical for high-level text understanding (e.g., E. K. Scholnick and W. S. Hall, 1991). Fifth graders, 10th graders, and college undergraduates participated in this study of the importance of cognitive words in skilled reading comprehension. Positive correlations with cognitive word knowledge were significantly higher for verbal (vocabulary and reading comprehension) than for quantitative achievement percentiles. The order of acquisition of cognitive words depended on a complex interaction among frequency of the replacement cognitive word in established word frequency counts, the level of meaning as determined by the R. E. Frank and W. S. Hall (1991) conceptual difficulty hierarchy and whether the cognitive word was a cognate of think or know.

Epelboim J, Booth JR & Steinman RM (1994). Reading unspaced text: Implications for theories of reading eye movements. Vision Research, 34, 1735-1766. [pdf]

Investigated a reader's saccades by recording eye movements while 5 Ss read spaced and unspaced passages both silently and aloud. Modest increases in fixation durations and decreases in overall reading speed were observed when unspaced texts were read; Ss read unspaced texts with the same level of comprehension and percentage of regressions as spaced texts. The only global eye movement parameter that changed appreciably when spaces were removed was progressive saccade length; they were shorter in unspaced texts. The observed decrease in progressive saccade length tended to be proportional to an increase in text density. A model that could explain reading spaced texts could also explain reading unspaced texts with only a change of saccade length. Current emphasis on spaces as guides to reading eye movements must be reconsidered.

Stevenson HW, Chen C & Booth JR (1990). Influences of schooling and urban rural residence on gender differences in cognitive abilities and academic achievement. Sex Roles, 23, 535-551. [pdf]

Analyzed gender differences among 1,151 schooled and nonschooled Quechua children (aged 6-22 yrs) who lived in the city or in remote rural environments in Peru by administering a battery of tests that assessed reading and mathematics achievement and tapped a broad range of cognitive functions. 51% of Ss were female. Large differences in cognitive functioning were associated with attendance at school, grade in school, age, and urban/rural residence. Gender accounted for less than 5% of the variance in Ss' performance on cognitive and academic tasks. Gender effects declined with increased amount of schooling. This was reflected in interactions involving gender and schooling for Ss who did not attend school or were in the 1st grade. Results present a complicated picture of various interactional effects of task, location, age, and schooling on the detected gender differences in cognitive abilities and academic achievement.