Lexical expertise and reading skill: bottom-up and top-down processing of lexical ambiguity |
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| Authors: | Sally Andrews Rachel Bond |
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| Institution: | (1) University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia |
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| Abstract: | The lexical quality hypothesis assumes that skilled readers rely on high quality lexical representations that afford autonomous
lexical retrieval and reduce the need to rely on top-down context. This experiment investigated this hypothesis by comparing
the performance of adults classified on reading comprehension and spelling performance. ‘Lexical experts’, defined by above
average performance on both measures, were compared with individuals who are good readers/poor spellers, poor readers/good
spellers, or poor on both measures. Sentences finishing with a homograph (e.g., She danced all night at the ball) were followed by a probe word and participants had to decide whether it had occurred in the sentence. Critical probe words
were related to either the sentence-congruous or the sentence-incongruous meaning of the homograph (e.g., waltz vs. throw). Lexical experts showed less interference from related probes than the other groups. When the sentences were presented at
fast rates, poorer spellers showed interference for sentence-congruous but not sentence-incongruous probes. However, at slower
presentation rates, all groups showed equivalent interference for both types of probes. The results support the lexical quality
hypothesis by showing that high quality lexical representations, indexed by better spelling, are associated with reduced reliance
on sentence context.
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| Keywords: | Reading skill Lexical processing Ambiguity |
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