title: A learning perspective on individual differences in skilled reading: Exploring and exploiting orthographic and semantic discrimination cues.
abstract: The goal of the present study is to understand the role orthographic and semantic information play in the behavior of skilled readers. Reading latencies from a self-paced sentence reading experiment in which Russian near-synonymous verbs were manipulated appear well-predicted by a combination of bottom-up sublexical letter triplets (trigraphs) and top-down semantic generalizations, modeled using the Naive Discrimination Learner. The results reveal a complex interplay of bottom-up and top-down support from orthography and semantics to the target verbs, whereby activations from orthography only are modulated by individual differences. Using performance on a serial reaction time (SRT) task for a novel operationalization of the mental speed hypothesis, we explain the observed individual differences in reading behavior in terms of the exploration/exploitation hypothesis from reinforcement learning, where initially slower and more variable behavior leads to better performance overall. (PsycINFO Database Record
authors.affiliation: Department of Journalism Studies, The University of Sheffield.
authors.forename: Petar
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-9708-7031
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Milin
authors.affiliation: School of Languages and Cultures, The University of Sheffield.
authors.forename: Dagmar
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Divjak
authors.affiliation: Quantitative Linguistics, Department of Linguistics, Eberhard Karls University Tübingen.
authors.forename: R Harald
authors.initials: RH
authors.lastname: Baayen
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003463:Cues; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D007858:Learning; D016014:Linear Models; D008297:Male; D008960:Models, Psychological; D017711:Nonlinear Dynamics; D011581:Psychological Tests; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D055815:Young Adult