Towards a Diagnosis of Textual Difficulties for Children with Dyslexia (original) (raw)
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Reading and Writing, 2016
This study explored pronominal resolution as a measure of reading comprehension beyond single sentences. Specifically, it was hypothesized the ability to specify the referents of pronouns like this and these that have variable antecedents would be a good probe of the quality of the reader's mental model. This idea was tested in a study of 123 French eight-year-olds. After controlling for word decoding, vocabulary and syntactic knowledge, various aspects of pronominal comprehension were found to contribute independent variance to reading comprehension: (1) pronominal knowledge as measured in a pronoun selection task, (2) referent specification of pronouns that refer to protagonists. In addition, (3) referent specification of pronouns (French y and en) with variable antecedents added further independent variance. The results support the idea that the ability to specify referents accounts for unique variance in reading comprehension and may tap the quality of the reader's mental model of preceding text.
MANULEX: A grade-level lexical database from French elementary school readers
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This article presents MANULEX, a Web-accessible database that provides grade-level word frequency lists of nonlemmatized and lemmatized words (48,886 and 23,812 entries, respectively) computed from the 1.9 million words taken from 54 French elementary school readers. Word frequencies are provided for four levels: first grade (G1), second grade (G2), third to fifth grades (G3-5), and all grades (G1-5). The frequencies were computed following the methods describedby Carroll, Davies, and Richman (1971) and Zeno, Ivenz, Millard, and Duwuri (1995), with four statistics at each level (F, overall word frequency;D, index of dispersion across the selectedreaders;U, estimated frequencyper million words; andSFI, standard frequency index). The database also provides the number of letters in the word and syntactic category information. MANULEX is intended to be a useful tool for studying language development through the selection of stimuli based on precise frequency norms. Researchers in artificial intelligence can also use it as a source of information on natural language processing to simulate written language acquisition in children. Finally, it may serve an educational purpose by providing basic vocabulary lists.
Towards the Automatic Classification of Reading Disorders in Continuous Text Passages
In this paper, we present an automatic classification approach to identify reading disorders in children. This identification is based on a standardized test. In the original setup the test is performed by a human supervisor who measures the reading duration and notes down all reading errors of the child at the same time. In this manner we recorded tests of 38 children who were suspected to have reading disorders. The data was confronted to an automatic system which employs speech recognition and prosodic analysis to identify the reading errors. In a subsequent classification experiment -based on the speech recognizer's output, the duration of the test, and prosodic features -94.7 % of the children could be classified correctly.
Use of Domain Knowledge in Resolving Pronominal Anaphora
Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 1996
The research reported here has been conducted in the context of the Plinius project, which aims at semi-automatic knowledge acquisition from short naturallanguage texts. In this framework, a system has been developed for finding the antecedents of pronominal anaphora, in particular 'it'-and 'its'-anaphora. The anaphora resolution module operates on parser output and can make use of information generated by the parser; the lexicon gives the conceptual representations corresponding to the words. The algorithm for anaphora resolution involves three steps: (i) Assemble: construct a list of discourse entities (DEs); (ii) Identify: identify anaphoric DEs; (iii) Select: select, for each anaphoric DE, another DE from the list of DEs as its antecedent. The third step applies four constraints, i.e. rules to which a DE must conform in order to be a valid candidate: (a) semantic type agreement; (b) number agreement; (c) projection constraint; (d) conceptual compatibility. Constraints (a, b, c) are linguistic, while (d) is domain-related. The algorithm has been tested on three texts. It turns out that applying (d) before (a, b, c) considerably improves efficiency.
1994
The process of pronoun understanding in skilled and less-skilled EFL learners was investigated based on approaches used in Ll studies. Japanese university students at two different levels of English language proficiencies as determined by a standard test were asked to read the sentences which included the pronouns lze or sJze, and their reading times and comprehension accuracy were measured, The result showed that the less-skMed learners read the sentences focusing on the morphosyntactic informatlon of the pronoun, "Jhereas the skilled Iearners encoded the semantic information as well as the morphosyntactic cues. The reasons why the skilled learners performed better are discussed. context and raise some central issues on pronoun understanding. I will then conduct an experiment which was designed based on this Ll research to determine how EFL Iearners
EXPLORING PRONOUNS IN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE: "LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD "
2023
Syntax is the branch of linguistics that describes sentence structure. In syntax, we begin by learning the fundamentals. The fundamentals are the components of speech. nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections make up the parts of speech. Among them, the pronoun is the most important because we use it frequently. By pronoun, plenty of sentences could be made. The purpose of this study is to determine the proportion of pronouns in a short story entitled "Little Red Riding Hood". The writer uses the descriptive qualitative method in this study. The result of this analysis shows that the phrase of the "Little Red Riding Hood" story, contains 54 instances of subject pronouns. Following by 37 object pronouns as the second most frequent pronoun. The following is a possessive adjective with 9 instances, and a possessive pronoun with 0 instances.
The Linguistic Basis of Reading Disorders: Implications for the Speech-Language Pathologist
Language Speech and Hearing Services in Schools
Recent theory and clinical insight have emphasized the linguistic aspects of reading and reading disorders. As a result, some speech-language pathologists are playing a more integral role in the identification, assessment, and remediation of reading disorders. This paper discusses the linguistic basis of reading and reading problems, and provides some guidance to speech-language pathologists on how they can use their knowledge of language to deal more effectively with developmental reading disorders.