Two experiments examined whether word recognition progressed from one word to the next during reading, as maintained by sequential attention shift models such as the E-Z Reader model. The boundary technique was used to control the visibility of to-be-identified short target words, so that they were either previewed in the parafovea or masked. The…

The precise structure of speech sound representations is still a matter of debate. In the present neurobiological study, we compared predictions about differential sensitivity to speech contrasts between models that assume full specification of all phonological information in the mental lexicon with those assuming sparse representations (only…

Participants' eye movements were monitored while they read sentences in which high-frequency and low-frequency target words were presented either in normal font (e.g., account) or case alternated (e.g., aCcOuNt). The influence of the word frequency and case alternation manipulations on fixation times was examined. Although both manipulations had…

Speech processing requires sensitivity to long-term regularities of the native language yet demands listeners to flexibly adapt to perturbations that arise from talker idiosyncrasies such as nonnative accent. The present experiments investigate whether listeners exhibit "dimension-based statistical learning" of correlations between acoustic…

In whole report, a sentence presented sequentially at the rate of about 10 words/s can be recalled accurately, whereas if the task is to report only two target words (e.g., red words), the second target suffers an attentional blink if it appears shortly after the first target. If these two tasks are carried out simultaneously, is there an…

Preview benefits (PBs) from two words to the right of the fixated one (i.e., word N + 2) and associated parafoveal-on-foveal effects are critical for proposals of distributed lexical processing during reading. This experiment examined parafoveal processing during reading of Chinese sentences, using a boundary manipulation of N + 2-word preview…

We used the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) to test two hypotheses that might explain why no conclusive evidence has been found for the existence of n + 2 preprocessing effects. In Experiment 1, we tested whether parafoveal processing of the second word to the right of fixation (n + 2) takes place only when the preceding word (n + 1) is very…

A word's frequency of occurrence and its predictability from a prior context are key factors determining how long the eyes remain on that word in normal reading. Past reaction-time and eye movement research can be distinguished by whether these variables, when combined, produce interactive or additive results, respectively. Our study addressed…

Languages are known to exhibit universal restrictions on sound structure. The source of such restrictions, however, is contentious: Do they reflect abstract phonological knowledge, or properties of linguistic experience and auditory perception? We address this question by investigating the restrictions on onset structure. Across languages, onsets…

People were trained to decode noise-vocoded speech by hearing monosyllabic stimuli in distorted and unaltered forms. When later presented with different stimuli, listeners were able to successfully generalize their experience. However, generalization was modulated by the degree to which testing stimuli resembled training stimuli: Testing stimuli's…