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Understanding emotions is an important predictor of children's mental health and school adjustment. However, interventions to improve this skill are not always accessible to all children. In 2019, Roy, Dénommée, and Quenneville developed stories with content specifically designed to 'teach' about emotions. Because it is a literacy-oriented intervention, it is possible that vocabulary may play a role in learning. This project explored the role of vocabulary in understanding emotion in preschool children and its learning. Forty-three preschoolers (19 control and 24 experimental) were evaluated on vocabulary skills and emotion comprehension. For multiple components, results showed an effect of time of measure, regardless of group. However, the addition of receptive vocabulary as a covariate made this effect non-significant. Results revealed that the stories were an effective strategy in promoting emotion comprehension for Components Belief and Reminder; two skills that are in the process of development in this age group. Furthermore, vocabulary skills did not impact the interaction for Belief for post-test gains and, for Reminder , while emotional vocabulary skills impacted the interaction at post-test, receptive vocabulary did not.

Psychometric tests related to vocabulary assessments are, for the most part, restricted in their use by trained professionals and/or are costly. These restrictions limit their use, especially for research purposes. To circumvent these limitations, the Raney Vocabulary Measure was created for assessing vocabulary proficiency, specifically for research purposes. The measure consists of 30 questions where participants were instructed to choose the best definition of each word. The purpose of the study was to examine the utility of the new measure using the highly standardized but protected Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. Results from the linear combination of the subscales revealed the significant prediction of the Raney Vocabulary Measure, with the Vocabulary subtest contributing most to the unique variance. These results support that the test examines vocabulary ability. The current results are promising as the test would allow for greater accessibility for researchers who do not have access to restricted psychometric tests.

When reading a text and searching for a target letter, readers make more omissions of the target letter if it is embedded in frequent function words than if it is in rare content words. While word frequency effects are consistently found, few studies have examined the impacts of passage familiarity on the missing-letter effect and studies that have present conflicting evidence. The present study examines the effects of passage familiarity, as well as the impacts of passage familiarization strategy promoting surface or deep encoding, on the missing-letter effect. Participants were familiarized with a passage by retyping a text, replacing all common nouns with synonyms, or generating a text on the same topic as that of the original text, and then completed a letter search task on the familiar passage as well as an unfamiliar passage. In Experiment 1, when both familiar and unfamiliar passages use the same words, results revealed fewer omissions for the retyping and synonyms conditions. However, in Experiment 2, when different words are used in both types of texts, no effect of familiarization strategy was observed. Furthermore, the missing-letter effect is maintained in all conditions, adding support to the robustness of the effect regardless of familiarity with the text.

When participants read a text while searching for a target letter, they are more likely to miss the target letter embedded in frequent function words than in less frequent content words. This effect is usually observed with a text displayed normally, for which it has been found that frequent function words are fixated for a smaller amount of time than less frequent content words. However, similar pattern of omissions have been observed with a rapid serial visual presentation procedure in which words appear one at a time. These parallel results would demonstrate that fixation duration per se is not the proximal cause of the missing-letter effect only if eye movements are not made during the rapid serial visual presentation procedure. Therefore, the authors performed eye monitoring during the rapid serial visual presentation procedure. Results revealed that, with a rapid serial visual presentation procedure, participants fixated function and content words for almost the entire presentation duration. It is concluded that eye movements are not the proximal cause of the missing-letter effect., (2010 APA, all rights reserved.)

When asked to detect target letters while reading a text, participants miss more letters in frequent function words than in less frequent content words. In this phenomenon, known as the missing-letter effect, two factors covary: word frequency and word class. According to the GO model, there should be an interaction between word class and word frequency with more omissions for function than for content words only among high-frequency words. This pattern would be due to the fact that function words could only assume a structure-supporting role if they are identified rapidly, which is only possible for high-frequency words. These predictions were tested by assessing omission rate for frequent and rare function and content words. Results lend support to the GO model with more omissions for frequent than for rare words, and more omissions for the function than for the content word among high-frequency words, but not among low-frequency words. These results were observed both in English (Experiment 1) and in French (Experiment 2).

When participants search for a target letter while reading, they make more omissions if the target letter is embedded in frequently used words or in the most frequent meaning of a polysemic word. According to the processing time hypothesis, this occurs because familiar words and meanings are identified faster, leaving less time for letter identification. Contrary to the predictions of the processing time hypothesis, with a rapid serial visual presentation procedure, participants were slower at detecting target letters for more frequent words or the most frequent meaning of a word (Experiments 1 and 2) or at detecting the word itself instead of a target letter (Experiment 3). In Experiments 4 and 5, participants self-initiated the presentation of each word, and the same pattern of results was observed as in Experiments 1 and 3. Positive correlations were also found between omission rate and response latencies., (((c) 2003 APA, all rights reserved))

In tests used to measure reading comprehension, validity is important in obtaining accurate results. Unfortunately, studies have shown that people can correctly answer some questions of these tests without reading the related passage. These findings bring forth the need to address whether this phenomenon is observed in multiple-choice only tests or in those that employ open-ended questions. Three common standardized reading comprehension tests were examined: the WIAT-III, the CAAT, and the Nelson-Denny. The WIAT-III is composed of open-ended questions, while the other two tests utilize multiple-choice questions. All participants were instructed to answer the questions to the best of their ability, without access to the related passage. The results revealed that participants correctly answered the questions at a significantly higher rate than by chance for the multiple-choice, which supports the independency issue. For the open-ended questions, participants still answered with 18% accuracy, without the passages.