"The Poet of Science": how scientists read their Tennyson

Tennyson’s responses to science have been thoroughly documented and discussed, but how did scientists respond to his poetry? Through examining in detail the work of three scientists who wrote at length about Tennyson--the astronomer Norman Lockyer, the physicist Oliver Lodge, and the American geologist William North Rice--it is possible to see how Tennyson went from being respected by contemporary scientists to being feted as the Poet of Science itself after his death. As a materialist, a Spiritualist, and a Darwinian Methodist respectively, Lockyer, Lodge, and Rice had very different conceptions of how science worked and what it implied about the universe, yet each looked to Tennyson and his poetry to confirm and extend his own judgements and values.

Does the PMSP connectionist model of single word reading learn to read in the same way as a child?

The Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg and Patterson (1996) connectionist model of reading was evaluated at two points early in its training against reading data collected from British children on two occasions during their first year of literacy instruction. First, the network’s non-word reading was poor relative to word reading when compared with the children. Second, the network made more non-lexical than lexical errors, the opposite pattern to the children. Three adaptations were made to the training of the network to bring it closer to the learning environment of a child: an incremental training regime was adopted; the network was trained on grapheme– phoneme correspondences; and a training corpus based on words found in children’s early reading materials was used. The modifications caused a sharp improvement in non-word reading, relative to word reading, resulting in a near perfect match to the children’s data on this measure. The modified network, however, continued to make predominantly non-lexical errors, although evidence from a small-scale implementation of the full triangle framework suggests that this limitation stems from the lack of a semantic pathway. Taken together, these results suggest that, when properly trained, connectionist models of word reading can offer insights into key aspects of reading development in children.

Is children's reading “good enough”? Links between online processing and comprehension as children read syntactically ambiguous sentences

We monitored 8- and 10-year-old children’s eye movements as they read sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity to obtain a detailed record of their online processing. Children showed the classic garden-path effect in online processing. Their reading was disrupted following disambiguation, relative to control sentences containing a comma to block the ambiguity, although the disruption occurred somewhat later than would be expected for mature readers. We also asked children questions to probe their comprehension of the syntactic ambiguity offline. They made more errors following ambiguous sentences than following control sentences, demonstrating that the initial incorrect parse of the garden-path sentence influenced offline comprehension. These findings are consistent with “good enough” processing effects seen in adults. While faster reading times and more regressions were generally associated with better comprehension, spending longer reading the question predicted comprehension success specifically in the ambiguous condition. This suggests that reading the question prompted children to reconstruct the sentence and engage in some form of processing, which in turn increased the likelihood of comprehension success. Older children were more sensitive to the syntactic function of commas, and, overall, they were faster and more accurate than younger children.