Print exposure across the reading life span

Abstract

Leisure reading is a main contributor to print exposure, which is in turn related to individual differences in reading and language skills. The Author Recognition Test (ART) is a brief and objective measure of print exposure that has been used in reading research since the 1990s. Life span studies have reported contradicting results concerning age differences in print exposure, possibly due to the use of ART versions that differed regarding authors' mean publication year. We investigated effects of participant age and authors' mean publication year, literary level, and circulation frequency on author recognition probability between adolescence and old age (N = 339; age 13-77 years). An explanatory item response analysis showed that participant age and circulation frequency were positively related to recognition probability. Mean publication year was negatively related to recognition probability, indicating that recent authors who have been widely read for only a few years were less often recognized than classic authors who have been widely read for several decades. The relation between participant age and recognition probability was moderated by author variables. For classic authors, the recognition probability increased between adolescence and old age. By contrast, for recent authors, the recognition probability increased only between adolescence and middle age. Our results suggest that the mean publication year is a key author variable for the detection of print exposure differences between young, middle-aged and older adults. We discuss implications for author selection when updating the ART and for measuring print exposure in age-diverse samples.

Second Language Acquisition and the Mastery of Discourse Connectives: Assessing the Factors That Hinder L2-Learners from Mastering French Connectives

“…Participants get a point for correctly identifying a real author, and get −1 point for each invented author incorrectly identified. After that, the non-native participants performed the German version of this test (Grolig et al 2020). In this test, 50 names were actual authors and 25 were invented.…”

“…As the participants were learners of French with a minimum level of B1, we assumed that they did not have much reading experience in French. We therefore decided to add, besides the ART-F test, a German version of the ART test (ART-Ger, Grolig et al 2020) for the learners. As a high exposure to print predicted in previous experiments a better mastery of discourse connectives for native speakers (Zufferey and Gygax 2020a), testing it explicitly for non-native speakers could bring further insight into the acquisition of connectives in L2.…”

Experiencing literature on the e‐reader: the effects of reading narrative texts on screen

“…To determine whether the participants had heard of the author Arno Geiger without revealing that they would read a text by this author, we asked them to fill out the German version of the ‘Authors Recognition Test’ version A (Grolig, Tiffin‐Richards, & Schroeder, 2020) before reading the text, which we extended to include 10 Austrian authors, one of whom was Arno Geiger, and five random Austrian names. Almost half of the participants (44.9%) had heard of the author Arno Geiger before reading the text.…”

Shared Storybook Reading and Oral Language Development: A Bioecological Perspective

“…To calculate a print exposure score that is corrected for guessing, the proportion of checked foils is subtracted from the proportion of checked real authors. ART scores are positively correlated with other measures of print exposure, such as reading habit questionnaires and activity diaries ( Allen et al, 1992 ; see Mol and Bus, 2011 , for a meta-analysis), real-world reading behaviors ( West et al, 1993 ), and participant age ( Grolig et al, 2020b ). Moreover, adults’ ART scores also correlate positively with children’s and adults’ language and reading skills ( West et al, 1993 ; Stanovich et al, 1995 ).…”

“…The main disadvantage of the ART is that the familiarity with author names differs between cultures. Therefore, the ART has been adapted for different cultures, including Chinese ( Chen and Fang, 2015 ), Dutch ( Brysbaert et al, 2020 ), German ( Grolig et al, 2020b ), and Korean ( Lee et al, 2019 ). Also, the popularity of authors changes over comparatively short time spans.…”