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Biomedical subjects

J R Beech

Publications and source records attributed to J R Beech.

9 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1992

Lexical and nonlexical routes: a comparison between normally achieving and poor readers.

This study investigated qualitative differences in poor readers relative to normally achieving readers of the same reading level. Thirty-eight 9-year-old poor readers and forty 7- and 8-year-old reading-age-matched normally achieving readers from the United Kingdom were matched in phonemic processing and then given tests of memory span and visual discrimination of letter-like characters, were required to read different word types (regular, exception, and pseudoword), and were asked to complete a homophonic pseudoword test. The poor readers were worse at reading pseudowords compared to the controls, but this difference was unrelated to phonemic length of number of letters, or to the ease of producing analogies for the pseudowords. The results suggest that although there are no differences with reading-age controls in phonological processing, poor readers have worse grapheme-phoneme conversion skills and greater reluctance to relinquish the lexical route when appropriate. The results also showed that poor readers were slightly better at visual discrimination but had poorer memory spans.

Achievement↗
PubMed1990

Parents' attitudes and the reading performance of their children.

A group of 60 children were given tests in reading performance, intelligence and personality while their parents were tested on personality, attitudes towards reading, and the frequency and duration of listening to their children reading. Factor analysis yielded two factors related to parental attitudes towards reading and their activities with their children as measured overtly and covertly, but these were not linked to the reading performance of the children. Instead, reading performance was linked to a morality variable in both the children and their parents. This suggested that there was a tendency for the poor readers and their parents to "fake good." This might account for the lack of association between reading performance and parental attitudes and activity in reading.

Achievement↗
PubMed1989

Developmental lag in reading in relation to physical growth and sex differences.

The relationship between physical growth and reading development was investigated using 200 children between 4 and 8 yr. of age. Boys of varied teeth maturity, controlling for age, IQ, class and physical height, varied significantly in their reading maturity. The same relationship was not found for girls.

Age Determination by Teeth↗
PubMed1979

Scanning visual images: implications for the representation of space.

This study investigated whether reaction time to detect an item within an image increases as a monotonic function of the relative or the absolute distance from the starting item to the probed item with the image. It was found that when relative probed distances were manipulated and absolute distances kept constant and, conversely, when absolute distances were manipulated and relative distances kept constant, reaction times were invariant across relative distance but increased as a function of increasing absolute distance. This result may be interpreted either in terms of operations within an imaginal representation or in terms of operations on propositional statements underlying the image.

Adult↗
PubMed1979

Image latency and recall as functions of array size.

A comparison of image latencies and recall as a function of increasing arrays of objects involved three groups of subjects listening to descriptions of arrangements of objects and responding when they had visualized each array as a whole. After each latency response, one group of subjects indicated if they had visualized all the objects, another group free recalled, and a third group had no additional task. A fourth group recalled the arrays immediately after the end of the description. Increasing array size, and hence the demands on the resources of the visual imagery system, produced a concomitant exponential-like deterioration in performance according to the latency and recall measures. However, the deterioration in recall only started above arrays of four objects compared with an increase in latencies across these array sizes; so the latency function is not produced by the unavailability of information, at least for smaller array sizes. The group who immediately recalled did not remember spatial positional information concerning the middle serial positions of six-object arrays as well as the group who underwent wholistic visualization prior to recall, indicating that the wholistic visualization process can facilitate the coding of spatial information.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1978

Visualization of compound scenes.

Subjects listened to descriptions of familiar objects and the spatial relations between them and attempted to visualize these objects as a composite scene. The time taken to generate a composite visual image, measured from the end of the verbal description, increased dramatically and linearly with the number of objects in the scene. As this relationship was independent of the rate of presentation of the verbal description, over a wide range, it could not be due to the visualization process cumulatively lagging behind the verbal description. Our evidence indicates that this relationship is due to some process, necessary to the subjective visualization of a composite array as a whole, which commences only after the verbal description is complete.

Female↗
PubMed1977

Effect of selective visual interference on visualization.

The extent of visual processing involved in visualizing objects was investigated by the use of selective visual interference. Subjects read concrete words and visualized them. This produced an approximately ten-fold increase in the slope of the latencies of wholistic visualization as a function of set size compared to that when subjects responded after listening to the descriptions of the objects. Males produced significantly steeper slopes than females in both listening and reading conditions, indicating that they find visualization more difficult. It is concluded that the interference on the visualization task was in the main disrupting active visual processing as no spatial manipulation of the objects was required.

Auditory Perception↗