Cambridge Scholars Publishing Developmental Dyslexia and Anaphora Resolution in English L1/L2: The Effect of Referent Abstractness

This book presents the results of three experimental studies focusing on the ability of people with dyslexia to resolve ambiguous anaphoric sentences where concrete and abstract referents are present. Each study represents a step in the ongoing investigation of this issue, and stems from questions left unanswered by previous research. This work is primarily inspired by the desire to gain a better understanding of the role of syntactic and lexical knowledge in text comprehension, and, more specifically, of the effects of word concreteness and abstractness in anaphora resolution contexts for readers with dyslexia. The book also investigates the resources necessary to process ambiguous anaphoric sentences. The innovative methodology implemented here comprises both experimental techniques (such as eye-tracking) and the use of questionnaires and standardised tests to answer specific research questions. It also puts forward a hypothesis that explains the different deficits manifesting in people with dyslexia, and suggests that, in reading comprehension tasks, the known impairment in people with dyslexia’s working memory may hinder their ability to efficiently and accurately perform tasks involving procedural memory resources. As a consequence, this impairment would emerge as disruptions of people with dyslexia’s semantic and syntactic competence, as well as their functioning in complex tasks which are particularly demanding in terms of working memory resources. About the Author Nicoletta Simi is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Psychology of the University of Tuebingen, Germany. She holds a PhD in English linguistics from the Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistics of the University of Pisa, Italy. During her PhD research, her work focused on the development of a comprehensive understanding of key phenomena that are at stake in reading comprehension processes. Currently, she investigates how conflicts of a linguistic nature are detected, monitored and adapted in L1 speakers of English and German. She deals with lexical ambiguity, negation, and world knowledge violations.