Joke City and beyond: supporting comprehension improvement through language, gesture and jokes

1. Joke City and beyond: supporting comprehension improvement through language, gesture and jokes Nicola Yuill Psychology/Cognitive Science University of Sussex nicolay@sussex.ac.uk www.riddles.sussex.ac.uk

2. Plan of talk Causes of poor comprehension Metalinguistic awareness Aims of intervention Joke City study Language and comprehension gain Gesture and comprehension gain Conclusions and questions

3. Poor comprehension

4. Poor reading comprehension: causes Poor working memory: simultaneous storage and processing e.g. mental arithmetic Poor inferential skill: John took 5 books. How many books? John pedalled over the bridge. How did John travel? Poor �language awareness�: distinguishing form and meaning, knowing how you know (Yuill & Oakhill, 1992)

5. Language awareness Treating text as interpreted: Poor comprehenders: define reading in terms of decoding (best reader = read hardest words) have difficulty with deductive inference: How do you know that x....? have poor understanding of jokes that play on meaning (but not that play on sound)

6. Not just a memory problem� Knowing how to use knowledge Cain & Oakhill (1999) Stories: �They set off for home, pedalling as fast as they could.� Questions: How did they travel home? Poor comprehenders 53% correct Prompts: If incorrect: look at story again -> 68% E directs child to relevant part of text ->85% Clue: What sort of things can we pedal? ->100%

7. Ambiguity resolution problems 48 children, 7-9yrs, varying in comprehension skill: �Look at that bat� (choose 2 of 4 pictures) �The man said the duck was ready to eat.� What could it mean? What else could it mean? (TLC, Wiig, 1998) Comprehension skill predicts ambiguity score, r(46) = .46, p<.001 (w/o acc and age)

8. Understanding communication

9. Jokes (BAHLAS:Yuill & George, 2000)

10. Language awareness and comprehension Poor sensitivity to meaning Poor understanding of communication Poor understanding of meaning ambiguity Poor understanding of jokes

11. Aims of intervention: Questions Practice: benefits to children, esp. given the neglect of comprehension Process: theoretical understanding of comprehension processes. Children lack x, train x, does comprehension improve? Relation of intervention to normal comprehension processes: what should the control conditions be? Why don�t some children develop x naturally? Is x a piece of knowledge or an attitude to reading?

12. Comprehension training Some training is very reflective, teaching explicit and metacognitive knowledge and strategies (e.g. Paris) Some work assumes implicit (not directly trainable?) processes (e.g. Gernsbacher, inhibition) MLA seems amenable to training to improve comprehension By encouraging children to have an interrogative attitude to text �how? Make it problematic�

13. MLA training can work: 1 session of training children to search for �clue� words in deliberately ambiguous texts brings significant comprehension increase on similar texts. (Yuill & Joscelyne 1988) 7 30-minute group sessions, riddle training vs �funny stories�. Significant comprehension increase for riddle group on standardised test. (Yuill, 1998) 3 25-minute sessions with Joke City software: explaining jokes, requiring children to articulate ambiguity and alternate interpretations of text, sig. better on Neale compr. than control no treatment. (Yuill & Bradwell, 1998)

14. Comprehension skills improve after discussing ambiguity in joking riddles

15. Looking at process: Joke City in more detail Do children whose comprehension improves talk about different things from children who don�t improve? Does what children talk about change across the training sessions? Do any changes across sessions relate to how much children improve in comprehension? (so is metalinguistic awareness an engine for change?)

16. Coding scheme (Yuill & George 2006) Metacognitive: self, other or joint knowledge or ignorance, thinking aloud Aah, I get it! I don�t understand. Do you know? We did it right. Metalinguistic: defining cued or uncued meaning, or both, metalinguistic play and exploration Does this restaurant serve fish?� ��Yes, what do you want to eat, Mr Fish?� �serve�: cued meaning = object which is served, uncued meaning = agent to whom food is served. Cued AND uncued at once: I get it! Cos they serve fish on a plate and they serve fish to the fish. Control: task management, responses to control: Your turn to read Reading from screen Does this restaurant serve fish? Reliability over 90%

17. High improvers made more metalinguistic comments than medium or low improvers in Session 3

18. Examples of cued/uncued comments spotted �cos leopards they have spots and it�s cos they get spotted� (= seen) serve fish �he�s a fish and he likes to eat fish� bed socks �you wear them to bed and the bed�s wearing them� pinch �you can pinch someone on the leg or you can pinch sweets without paying� roll �you can roll a sausage roll� Hard to articulate�. Other ways to express?

19. What about gestures? Gestures seem to indicate concepts on the brink of a child�s understanding (Goldin-Meadow, Pine) Mismatches: children who express one idea in speech and another in gesture are more likely to improve on balance beam task than gesture-speech matchers (Pine et al., 2004) Gestures show the listener what the actor understands Perhaps gestures help a child�s own understanding Language ambiguity seems to be a prime example where gestures might be used before speech

20. Method of coding gestures for Joke City Collected all clips containing gestures (N=100) Gestures coded as referring to cued (obvious) or uncued (non-obvious) meaning of the joke: How do you make a sausage roll? Push it down a hill?� roll = �pastry� = cued, �rotate� = uncued Usually clear: adults can recognise which meaning, without sound Number of cued and uncued gestures (counting repeated gestures once only)

21. Gestures: examples

22. Associations of gestures and comprehension measures Tot. no. gestures and pre-test reading comprehension r(20) = .61 cued, .58 uncued (r accuracy both <.2, n.s., vocab r .2-.4, n.s., semantic fluency n.s.) Gestures and ambiguous word test, r(20) = .51 (cued), .61 (uncued) Gestures and metalinguistic utterances

23. Book plug� .