Understanding reading as a form of language-use: A language game hypothesis

Wallot, Sebastian

doi:10.1016/j.newideapsych.2015.07.006

Cited by 10 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Prior studies show that reading performance becomes more structured with higher determinism as reading skill increases (Wijnants et al, 2009 , 2012 ; Wallot et al, 2012 ), and determinism is higher in more fluent readers (O'Brien et al, 2014 ; Wallot et al, 2014 ). It has been suggested that measures of temporal structure of reading times, such as RQA %Determinism, capture how well readers utilize the informational structure of a text, and conversely, how well a texts constrains the reading process toward efficient and fluent reading (Wallot, 2015 , 2016 ). Hence, high degrees of %Determinism should be positively correlated with aspects of reader skill.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Silent Reading Fluency and Comprehension in Bilingual Children

O’Brien

Wallot

2016

Front. Psychol.

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This paper focuses on reading fluency by bilingual primary school students, and the relation of text fluency to their reading comprehension. Group differences were examined in a cross-sectional design across the age range when fluency is posed to shift from word-level to text-level. One hundred five bilingual children from primary grades 3, 4, and 5 were assessed for English word reading and decoding fluency, phonological awareness, rapid symbol naming, and oral language proficiency with standardized measures. These skills were correlated with their silent reading fluency on a self-paced story reading task. Text fluency was quantified using non-linear analytic methods: recurrence quantification and fractal analyses. Findings indicate that more fluent text reading appeared by grade 4, similar to monolingual findings, and that different aspects of fluency characterized passage reading performance at different grade levels. Text fluency and oral language proficiency emerged as significant predictors of reading comprehension.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Silent Reading Fluency and Comprehension in Bilingual Children

O’Brien

Wallot

2016

Front. Psychol.

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“…Laminar flow in reading process measures can be interpreted as an indicator of reading fluency. Hence, measures of temporal structure (i.e., %REC, %DET, ADL, MDL) in time-series of reading performance might be an indicator of reading fluency, particularly effortlessness of the reading process and ease-of-comprehension during reading (Wallot, 2015(Wallot, , 2016.…”

Section: Applications Of Rqa In Reading and Writing Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, there might be other cases where this is not a good idea. For example, I have proposed (Wallot, 2015(Wallot, , 2016) that recurrence properties can be used to infer how strongly cognitive processes are coupled to linguistic information and that would include correlations between reading times and word frequency, for example. In this case, removing the shared variance between word frequency (and other, similar variables) and reading times would not be sensible.…”

Section: Windowed Rqamentioning

confidence: 99%

Recurrence Quantification Analysis of Processes and Products of Discourse: A Tutorial in R

Wallot

2017

Discourse Processes

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Processes of naturalistic reading and writing are based on complex linguistic input, stretch-out over time, and rely on an integrated performance of multiple perceptual, cognitive, and motor processes. Hence, naturalistic reading and writing performance is nonstationary and exhibits fluctuations and transitions. However, instead of being just complications for the analysis of such data, they are also informative about cognitive change, fluency, and reading or writing skill. To use and quantify such dynamics, one needs appropriate statistics that capture these aspects. In this article I introduce Recurrence Quantification Analysis (RQA) as a tool to capture such dynamic structure. After a conceptual introduction of the analysis, I present a stepby-step tutorial on how to run RQA using R. Guidance is given with regard to common issues and best practices using this time-series analysis technique. Finally, I review previous results from studies applying RQA to reading and writing and summarize current hypotheses and interpretations of RQA measures in the context of reading and writing.

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“…LGH adapts the notion of the language game to reading, specifically interpreting different reading tasks and/or stimulus configurations in analogy to different situations of language-use in which the perceptual-cognitive processes of reading unfold. Accordingly, different reading tasks might be governed by very different “rules” and not by a universal reading process [17]. LGH was formulated to address concerns regarding the problem of meaning in contemporary reading research, but also with regard to mounting evidence that linguistic rules are not universal across different languages and reading tasks (e.g., [18]).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The situational roots entailed by the LGH suggest that measures of cognitive performance should exhibit complexity properties when changes in situation or task occur, which otherwise would be ascribed solely to the cognitive processes themselves [15,17]. They further suggest that so-called “complexity flags” (e.g., changes in fractal properties and indicators of phase-transition outlined in more detail below) are more fundamental basic properties that we might expect from self-organized cognitive architectures [20,41,42].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Switching between reading tasks leads to phase-transitions in reading times in L1 and L2 readers

2019

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Reading research uses different tasks to investigate different levels of the reading process, such as word recognition, syntactic parsing, or semantic integration. It seems to be tacitly assumed that the underlying cognitive process that constitute reading are stable across those tasks. However, nothing is known about what happens when readers switch from one reading task to another. The stability assumptions of the reading process suggest that the cognitive system resolves this switching between two tasks quickly. Here, we present an alternative language-game hypothesis (LGH) of reading that begins by treating reading as a softly-assembled process and that assumes, instead of stability, context-sensitive flexibility of the reading process. LGH predicts that switching between two reading tasks leads to longer lasting phase-transition like patterns in the reading process. Using the nonlinear-dynamical tool of recurrence quantification analysis, we test these predictions by examining series of individual word reading times in self-paced reading tasks where native (L1) and second language readers (L2) transition between random word and ordered text reading tasks. We find consistent evidence for phase-transitions in the reading times when readers switch from ordered text to random-word reading, but we find mixed evidence when readers transition from random-word to ordered-text reading. In the latter case, L2 readers show moderately stronger signs for phase-transitions compared to L1 readers, suggesting that familiarity with a language influences whether and how such transitions occur. The results provide evidence for LGH and suggest that the cognitive processes underlying reading are not fully stable across tasks but exhibit soft-assembly in the interaction between task and reader characteristics.

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Understanding reading as a form of language-use: A language game hypothesis

Cited by 10 publications

References 29 publications

Silent Reading Fluency and Comprehension in Bilingual Children

Silent Reading Fluency and Comprehension in Bilingual Children

Recurrence Quantification Analysis of Processes and Products of Discourse: A Tutorial in R

Switching between reading tasks leads to phase-transitions in reading times in L1 and L2 readers

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