Jane Oakhill
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 863550 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Jane Oakhill |
| NOMBRES | Jane |
| APELLIDO | Oakhill |
| FIRMA | OAKHILL J |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Sussex |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8810-3714 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 42 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 110 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 42 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1975 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
The impact of a story-based intervention on language, literacy, and cognitive development in South African pre-schoolers
Literacy rates in South Africa are low and many children start school without the requisite levels of emergent language and literacy skills needed to succeed. We report two RCTs of a story-based intervention delivered by preschool teachers to two language groups of children from low income backgrounds (isiXhosa: N children =82, N teachers =20; Afrikaans, N children =118, N teachers =24). The story-based intervention involved a 36-week programme, …
The Influence of Voice Masculinity and Femininity on Adults’ Expectations of Children’s Academic and Occupational Competence
Gender-related acoustic features of voices may play a role in perceived aptitude for academic subjects and occupations. In the present study, parents and teachers rated the perceived competence of children they did not know with respect to a range of gender-stereotyped academic subjects and future possible occupations. Ratings were based solely on re-synthesized recordings of 8 children (4 girls, 4 boys) saying a single sentence. Voice manipulati…
An immersive, ‘Faster Read’
Reading is fundamental to academic success, but international reading surveys indicate current pedagogy fails a fifth of adolescents, disproportionately from lower-socioeconomic groups. This UK, mixed-method study evaluated the impact of two whole-text reading approaches on comprehension, using standardised tests. Twenty teachers of English and 413 students (12–13 years) participated, 44% defined as ‘struggling readers’, in parallel classes per s…
Children’s understanding of referential nominal metaphors
A referential metaphor is a cohesive tie between lexical items that are metaphorically related, (e.g. “The seagull took the bread from the coffee table. No one heard the thief”). The reference from the thief back to the seagull is metaphorical because thieves are human. The present article presents arguments and some empirical evidence that resolution of referential metaphors shares several of the core processes of general text comprehension. Two…
The development of explicit occupational gender stereotypes in children
Voice Cues Influence Children’s Assessment of Adults’ Occupational Competence
The adult voice is a strong bio-social marker for masculinity and femininity. In this study we investigated whether children make gender stereotypical judgments about adults’ occupational competence on the basis of their voice. Forty-eight 8- to 10- year olds were asked to rate the competence of adult voices that varied in vocal masculinity (by artificially manipulating voice pitch) and were randomly paired with 9 occupations (3 stereotypically m…
Introduction to the Special Issue
We are delighted to present this special issue of Discourse Processes , “Integration: The Keystone of Comprehension.” This special issue was developed from a symposium presented at the 28th annual meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse held in Brighton, UK, July 17 to 19, 2018. Each article explores research perspectives on the role of integration in text processing. All articles in this special issue are based on ideas presented in that s…
Four Decades of Research into Children’s Reading Comprehension
A substantial amount of research has focused on children’s reading development and reading problems, but in comparison there has been relatively little research into children’s reading comprehension. This article provides an overview of the research that has investigated the skills and cognitive processes that support children’s understanding of text and reflects on the implications of the findings presented in helping children to develop and imp…
Children's understanding of pronouns that differ in scope of reference
Some pronouns can refer to entities that vary widely in scope. In some cases, the referent might be a noun phrase, and in other cases it might be a whole proposition. In the cases of pronouns with a noun phrase antecedent, an already existing referent is reactivated from the preceding context. In the case of pronouns with a propositional antecedent, the referent must be reformulated. The interpretation and use of such pronouns was investigated in…
Anaphoric Islands and Anaphoric Forms
Two experiments are reported in which people resolve references to sets of entities (e.g., lies) that have previously been introduced either explicitly into a text (“the lies”) or implicitly via a cognate verb (a form of the verb “to lie”). Previous work has show that pronominal references to such entities were judged as relatively unacceptable and required longer judgement times when judgements were positive compared with cases in which the ante…
Social Consensus Feedback as a Strategy to Overcome Spontaneous Gender Stereotypes
Across two experiments the present research examined the use of social consensus feedback as a strategy for overcoming spontaneous gender stereotyping when certain social role nouns and professional terms are read. Participants were presented with word pairs comprising a role noun (e.g., surgeon) and a kinship term (e.g., mother) and asked to decide whether both terms could refer to the same person. In the absence of training, participants respon…
Temporal and Causal Reasoning in Deaf and Hearing Novice Readers
Temporal and causal information in text are crucial in helping the reader form a coherent representation of a narrative. Deaf novice readers are generally poor at processing linguistic markers of causal/temporal information (i.e., connectives), but what is unclear is whether this is indicative of a more general deficit in reasoning about temporal/causal information. In Study 1, 10 deaf and 63 hearing children, matched for comprehension ability an…
The Precursors of Reading Ability in Young Readers
We report a longitudinal study investigating the predictors of reading comprehension and word reading accuracy between the ages of 7 to 8 (UK Year 3) and 10 to 11 years (Year 6). We found that different skills predicted the development of each. Reading comprehension skill measured in Year 3 was a strong predictor of comprehension in Year 6; vocabulary and verbal IQ also made significant unique contributions to the prediction of comprehension abil…
Gender Representation in Different Languages and Grammatical Marking on Pronouns
Gygax, Gabriel, Sarrasin, Oakhill, and Garnham (2008) showed that readers form a mental representation of gender that is based on grammatical gender in French and German (i.e., masculine supposedly interpretable as a generic form) but is based on stereotypical information in English. In this study, a modification of their stimulus material was used to examine the additional potential influence of pronouns. Across the three languages, pronouns dif…
Generically intended, but specifically interpreted
The influence of stereotype and grammatical information (masculine intended as generic) on the representation of gender in language was investigated using a sentence evaluation paradigm. The first sentence introduced a role name (e.g., The spies came out ...) and the second sentence contained explicit information about the gender of one or more of the characters (e.g., ...one of the women ...). The experiment was conducted in French, German, and …
The Acquisition of Reading Comprehension Skill
This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction: Simple Ideas about Reading Comprehension A Framework for Comprehension Higher-Level Factors in Comprehension The Linguistic-Conceptual Machinery for Comprehension Word Identification, Decoding, and Phonological Awareness Comprehension Instruction Conclusion: A More General View of Comprehension Development Note
Sex differences in the effects of interest on boys' and girls' reading comprehension
This study compared the reading comprehension of groups of boys and girls (aged 10-11) on two tests, one of which was about the evacuation of children during the Second World War and the other of which was about spiders. These were the actual year 6 SATS reading tests administered in the UK in 1998 and 1999. The majority of the boys said that they would prefer to read the text about spiders, and the majority of the girls said they would prefer to…
Assessment matters
Background. The Neale Analysis of Reading Ability (NARA; Neale, 1997) is a widely used assessment of reading comprehension and word reading accuracy. Spooner, Baddeley, and Gathercole (2004) questioned the suitability of the NARA for identifying children with specific reading comprehension deficits.Aims and methods. An evaluation of the NARA measurement of word reading and reading comprehension level was undertaken in relation to models of readin…
Profiles of children with specific reading comprehension difficulties
Background. Children with fluent and accurate word reading in the presence of poor text comprehension are impaired on a wide range of reading-related tasks.Aims. This study investigated the consistency of skill impairment in a sample of poor comprehenders to identify any fundamental skill weakness that (i) might be associated with poor text comprehension, and (ii) might lead to depressed reading development. An additional aim was to determine whe…
Individual Differences in the Inference of Word Meanings From Context
Two studies investigated the ability to use contextual information in stories to infer the meanings of novel vocabulary by 9-10-year-olds with good and poor reading comprehension. Across studies, children with poor reading comprehension were impaired when the processing demands of the task were greatest. In Study 2, working memory capacity was related to performance, but short-term memory span and memory for the literal content of the text were n…
Children's Reading Comprehension Ability
The authors report data from a longitudinal study that addresses the relations between working memory capacity and reading comprehension skills in children aged 8, 9, and 11 years. At each time point, the authors assessed children’s reading ability, vocabulary and verbal skills, performance on 2 working memory assessments (sentence-span and digit working memory), and component skills of comprehen-sion. At each time point, working memory and compo…
The dissociation of word reading and text comprehension
In this paper, we discuss the relative contribution of several theoretically relevant skills and abilities in accounting for variance in both word reading and text comprehension. We present data from the first and second waves of a longitudinal study, when the children were 7 to 8 years, and 8 to 9 years old. In multiple regression analyses, we show that there is a dissociation between the skills and abilities that account for variance in word re…
The ability to learn new word meanings from context by school-age children with and without language comprehension difficulties
This study investigated young children's ability to use narrative contexts to infer the meanings of novel vocabulary items. Two groups of 15 seven- to eight-year olds participated: children with normally developing reading comprehension skill and children with weak reading comprehension skill. The children read short stories containing a novel word and were required to produce a meaning for the novel word, both before and after its useful definin…
Comprehension skill, inference-making ability, and their relation to knowledge
Children's Difficulties in Text Comprehension
In this article we consider the difficulties of children who have a specific reading comprehension problem. Our earlier work has shown that good and poor comprehenders differ, in particular, in their ability to make inferences, integrate information in text, understand story structure, and monitor their understanding. We outline some studies that illustrate the poor comprehenders' problems and present two studies that use a comprehension-age matc…
Profiles of children with specific reading comprehension difficulties
Background. Children with fluent and accurate word reading in the presence of poor text comprehension are impaired on a wide range of reading-related tasks.Aims. This study investigated the consistency of skill impairment in a sample of poor comprehenders to identify any fundamental skill weakness that (i) might be associated with poor text comprehension, and (ii) might lead to depressed reading development. An additional aim was to determine whe…
Inferential and Memory Skills in Children's Comprehension of Stories
An experiment was carried out to investigate 7-8 year-olds' use of implicit inferences in understanding stories. Two groups of children, differentiated by their ability at text comprehension, read four short stories and were asked a series of questions after each one. The results showed that skilled readers were better than less skilled readers at answering questions from memory shortly after reading a story, both when the questions could be answ…
Working memory, comprehension ability and the resolution of text anomaly
This article examines possible working memory deficits in 7-8-year-olds who are accurate readers but relatively poor comprehenders. In Expt 1, poor comprehenders scored below good comprehenders on a non-linguistic test of working memory (reading series of digits and recalling the last digit in each series) on the more taxing items. Experiment 2 examined the relationship between working memory and text comprehension using an anomaly resolution tas…
Constructive processes in skilled and less skilled comprehenders' memory for sentences
An experiment was carried out to investigate seven-eight-year-old children's memory for aurally presented sentences. A recognition-memory task was used to probe constructive memory processes in two groups differentiated by their ability at comprehending printed text. The recognition errors of both groups indicated that they constructed meanings implied by the original input sentences, whilst demonstrating poor memory for the syntactic form of the…
On-line resolution of anaphoric pronouns
An experiment is reported in which sentences containing anaphoric pronouns were presented for self-paced reading. Some of the pronouns could be resolved on the basis of their gender alone, others required inferences based on knowledge about the world. Subjects spent longer reading the second clause of a sentence when an inference was required to resolve the pronoun, suggesting that the pronouns were resolved as they were read. Resolution was not …
Sex differences in the effects of interest on boys' and girls' reading comprehension
This study compared the reading comprehension of groups of boys and girls (aged 10-11) on two tests, one of which was about the evacuation of children during the Second World War and the other of which was about spiders. These were the actual year 6 SATS reading tests administered in the UK in 1998 and 1999. The majority of the boys said that they would prefer to read the text about spiders, and the majority of the girls said they would prefer to…
Pronoun Resolution in Skilled and Less-Skilled Comprehenders
This paper reports two experiments that investigate skilled and less-skilled compre-henders' ability to understand pronouns. In the first experiment, the less-skilled group made more errors in answering questions about pronoun antecedents than did the skilled group, even when there was a gender cue to the correct referent, and when the clause containing the referents was available for them to refer back to. In the second experiment, the pronoun a…
Assessment matters
Background. The Neale Analysis of Reading Ability (NARA; Neale, 1997) is a widely used assessment of reading comprehension and word reading accuracy. Spooner, Baddeley, and Gathercole (2004) questioned the suitability of the NARA for identifying children with specific reading comprehension deficits.Aims and methods. An evaluation of the NARA measurement of word reading and reading comprehension level was undertaken in relation to models of readin…
Gender Representation in Different Languages and Grammatical Marking on Pronouns
Gygax, Gabriel, Sarrasin, Oakhill, and Garnham (2008) showed that readers form a mental representation of gender that is based on grammatical gender in French and German (i.e., masculine supposedly interpretable as a generic form) but is based on stereotypical information in English. In this study, a modification of their stimulus material was used to examine the additional potential influence of pronouns. Across the three languages, pronouns dif…
Understanding of anaphoric relations in skilled and less skilled comprehenders
This experiment investigated comprehension of four types of anaphor (reference, ellipsis, substitution and lexical) in 7 to 8−year-old good and poor comprehenders, matched in decoding skills but differing in reading comprehension skill. Poor comprehenders performed less well than skilled comprehenders both in identifying antecedents of anaphors in a story, and in answering questions on the text which required anaphor resolution. Both groups perfo…
Effects of time of day on the integration of information in text
This paper reports an experiment that used the self-paced reading technique to explore subjects' integrative processing of short texts at different times of day (early morning and late afternoon). The difficulty of the passages was manipulated by including pronouns which could either be resolved syntactically, or required an inference to determine their referent. The results showed that subjects tested in the afternoon dealt with referential diff…
Introduction to the Special Issue
We are delighted to present this special issue of Discourse Processes , “Integration: The Keystone of Comprehension.” This special issue was developed from a symposium presented at the 28th annual meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse held in Brighton, UK, July 17 to 19, 2018. Each article explores research perspectives on the role of integration in text processing. All articles in this special issue are based on ideas presented in that s…
Do levels of interest have an effect on children's comprehension monitoring performance
This study examines the effect of interest levels on the comprehension monitoring ability of 8- and 9-year-old children. Two groups participated in the study; they were matched for single-word reading and vocabulary skills, but differed in comprehension skill. Two tests were carried out which required the children to read a number of brief passages, some of which contained embedded problems. The children's task was to identify the problems. Test …
Representation of spatial descriptions in working memory
Two experiments examined subjects’ ability to make drawings of spatial layouts based on verbal descriptions. There were two sorts of descriptions that depended solely on the order of the sentences within them: (1) referentially continuous descriptions that can be immediately integrated into a unified representation, and (2) referentially discontinuous descriptions that cannot, because their second sentence makes no reference to what has gone befo…
Constructive processes in skilled and less skilled comprehenders' memory for sentences
An experiment was carried out to investigate seven-eight-year-old children's memory for aurally presented sentences. A recognition-memory task was used to probe constructive memory processes in two groups differentiated by their ability at comprehending printed text. The recognition errors of both groups indicated that they constructed meanings implied by the original input sentences, whilst demonstrating poor memory for the syntactic form of the…
Reading comprehension skill and detection errors on the letter t
Children's detection errors on the letter t in short passages were found to depend on their reading comprehension skill, the semantic and syntactic constraints of the passage, and whether or not the target letter appeared in the word the. All children made a high proportion of detection errors on the prose passage, but only the skilled group showed any difference in errors for the and non the words, making relatively more errors on the in the pro…
Inferential and Memory Skills in Children's Comprehension of Stories
An experiment was carried out to investigate 7-8 year-olds' use of implicit inferences in understanding stories. Two groups of children, differentiated by their ability at text comprehension, read four short stories and were asked a series of questions after each one. The results showed that skilled readers were better than less skilled readers at answering questions from memory shortly after reading a story, both when the questions could be answ…
On-line resolution of anaphoric pronouns
An experiment is reported in which sentences containing anaphoric pronouns were presented for self-paced reading. Some of the pronouns could be resolved on the basis of their gender alone, others required inferences based on knowledge about the world. Subjects spent longer reading the second clause of a sentence when an inference was required to resolve the pronoun, suggesting that the pronouns were resolved as they were read. Resolution was not …
Pronoun Resolution in Skilled and Less-Skilled Comprehenders
This paper reports two experiments that investigate skilled and less-skilled compre-henders' ability to understand pronouns. In the first experiment, the less-skilled group made more errors in answering questions about pronoun antecedents than did the skilled group, even when there was a gender cue to the correct referent, and when the clause containing the referents was available for them to refer back to. In the second experiment, the pronoun a…
Effects of time of day on the integration of information in text
This paper reports an experiment that used the self-paced reading technique to explore subjects' integrative processing of short texts at different times of day (early morning and late afternoon). The difficulty of the passages was manipulated by including pronouns which could either be resolved syntactically, or required an inference to determine their referent. The results showed that subjects tested in the afternoon dealt with referential diff…
Interpreting Elliptical Verb Phrases at Different Times of Day
This paper reports an experiment that used the self-paced reading technique to explore subjects' on-line processing of short texts at two times of day (early morning and late afternoon). A previous experiment (Oakhill, 1986b) has shown that, when reading simple texts, subjects adopt a “less effortful” strategy in the morning; they delay processing until it is needed to answer a question. in the present experiment, we used a more difficult anaphor…
Understanding of anaphoric relations in skilled and less skilled comprehenders
This experiment investigated comprehension of four types of anaphor (reference, ellipsis, substitution and lexical) in 7 to 8−year-old good and poor comprehenders, matched in decoding skills but differing in reading comprehension skill. Poor comprehenders performed less well than skilled comprehenders both in identifying antecedents of anaphors in a story, and in answering questions on the text which required anaphor resolution. Both groups perfo…
Working memory, comprehension ability and the resolution of text anomaly
This article examines possible working memory deficits in 7-8-year-olds who are accurate readers but relatively poor comprehenders. In Expt 1, poor comprehenders scored below good comprehenders on a non-linguistic test of working memory (reading series of digits and recalling the last digit in each series) on the more taxing items. Experiment 2 examined the relationship between working memory and text comprehension using an anomaly resolution tas…
Mental Models as Contexts for Interpreting Texts
One of the major tenets of the mental models theory of text comprehension is that the model of the text so far provides (part of) the context for understanding the current sentence. Using two sets of findings on the comprehension of anaphoric expressions, we attempt to provide a more specific interpretation for this statement. We first consider the linguistic distinction between deep and surface anaphors, and the proposal that they are interprete…
The effects of test expectancy on quality of note taking and recall of text at different times of day
An experiment is reported which investigated how the type of memory test that subjects are expecting after listening to a short prose passage affects the quality of the notes they take and their subsequent recall. It also explored whether effects of test expectations are modified by the time of day at which the subjects are tested. The results of the recall test showed that subjects noted and recalled more of the high importance ideas in the text…
Aberrant ellipsis
An account of recent theorizing about grammatical ellipsis, with examples of how advertisers have been bending the rules
When Children Read without Understanding
Children's Problems in Text Comprehension
Do levels of interest have an effect on children's comprehension monitoring performance
This study examines the effect of interest levels on the comprehension monitoring ability of 8- and 9-year-old children. Two groups participated in the study; they were matched for single-word reading and vocabulary skills, but differed in comprehension skill. Two tests were carried out which required the children to read a number of brief passages, some of which contained embedded problems. The children's task was to identify the problems. Test …
Inference making ability and its relation to comprehension failure in young children
Children's Difficulties in Text Comprehension
In this article we consider the difficulties of children who have a specific reading comprehension problem. Our earlier work has shown that good and poor comprehenders differ, in particular, in their ability to make inferences, integrate information in text, understand story structure, and monitor their understanding. We outline some studies that illustrate the poor comprehenders' problems and present two studies that use a comprehension-age matc…
Comprehension skill, inference-making ability, and their relation to knowledge
The dissociation of word reading and text comprehension
In this paper, we discuss the relative contribution of several theoretically relevant skills and abilities in accounting for variance in both word reading and text comprehension. We present data from the first and second waves of a longitudinal study, when the children were 7 to 8 years, and 8 to 9 years old. In multiple regression analyses, we show that there is a dissociation between the skills and abilities that account for variance in word re…
The ability to learn new word meanings from context by school-age children with and without language comprehension difficulties
This study investigated young children's ability to use narrative contexts to infer the meanings of novel vocabulary items. Two groups of 15 seven- to eight-year olds participated: children with normally developing reading comprehension skill and children with weak reading comprehension skill. The children read short stories containing a novel word and were required to produce a meaning for the novel word, both before and after its useful definin…
Individual Differences in the Inference of Word Meanings From Context
Two studies investigated the ability to use contextual information in stories to infer the meanings of novel vocabulary by 9-10-year-olds with good and poor reading comprehension. Across studies, children with poor reading comprehension were impaired when the processing demands of the task were greatest. In Study 2, working memory capacity was related to performance, but short-term memory span and memory for the literal content of the text were n…
Children's Reading Comprehension Ability
The authors report data from a longitudinal study that addresses the relations between working memory capacity and reading comprehension skills in children aged 8, 9, and 11 years. At each time point, the authors assessed children’s reading ability, vocabulary and verbal skills, performance on 2 working memory assessments (sentence-span and digit working memory), and component skills of comprehen-sion. At each time point, working memory and compo…
Assessment matters
Background. The Neale Analysis of Reading Ability (NARA; Neale, 1997) is a widely used assessment of reading comprehension and word reading accuracy. Spooner, Baddeley, and Gathercole (2004) questioned the suitability of the NARA for identifying children with specific reading comprehension deficits.Aims and methods. An evaluation of the NARA measurement of word reading and reading comprehension level was undertaken in relation to models of readin…
Profiles of children with specific reading comprehension difficulties
Background. Children with fluent and accurate word reading in the presence of poor text comprehension are impaired on a wide range of reading-related tasks.Aims. This study investigated the consistency of skill impairment in a sample of poor comprehenders to identify any fundamental skill weakness that (i) might be associated with poor text comprehension, and (ii) might lead to depressed reading development. An additional aim was to determine whe…
Psychology (39 obras) · Linguistics (35 obras) · Comprehension (28 obras) · Reading and Literacy Development (28 obras) · Cognitive psychology (27 obras) · Computer Science (22 obras) · Reading comprehension (20 obras) · Reading (process) (16 obras) · Developmental psychology (15 obras) · Artificial Intelligence (14 obras)