Reading morphologically complex words requires analysis of their morphemic subunits (e.g., play + er); however, the positional constraints of morphemic processing are still little understood. The current study involved three unprimed lexical decision experiments to directly compare the positional encoding of stems and affixes during reading and to…

Unlike other visual objects which are invariant to the left-right orientation, mirror letters (e.g., b and d) represent different object identities. Previous masked priming lexical decision studies have suggested that the identification of a mirror letter involves suppression of its mirror image counterpart reporting as evidence that a pseudoword…

The present study examined whether and how early cognitive flexibility, metalinguistic awareness, including phonological awareness (PA) and morphological awareness (MA), Chinese word reading (CWR), and listening comprehension (LC) influenced Chinese children's later reading comprehension. In total, 153 Chinese children were recruited. Path…

Neuropsychological case-studies suggested that dates and encyclopedic numbers may be processed differently than unknown numbers. However, this issue was seldom investigated in healthy participants. Therefore, it is unclear whether known dates are read like words (as lexical items), or like numbers (each position strictly defines digits' values in…

Previous research in alphabetic languages has shown that both position (external, internal) and distance (adjacent, nonadjacent) modulate letter position encoding during reading. To examine the generality of this pattern for a comprehensive model of word recognition and reading, we examined these effects during Chinese reading (i.e., an unspaced…

Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) learners are known to have vocabulary knowledge and language outcomes more heterogeneous than their hearing peers, with a greater incidence of difficulties presumably related (both as cause and effect) to documented challenges in academic domains. In particular, there is increasing evidence that differences may exist…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether long-term musical training enhances the ability to perceive and learn new auditory information. Listeners with extensive musical experience were expected to detect, learn, and retain novel words more effectively than participants without musical training. Advantages of musical training…

Numerous studies have provided evidence that readers generate phonological codes while reading. However, a central question in much of this research has been how early these codes are generated. Answering this question has implications for the roles that phonological coding might play for skilled readers, especially whether phonological codes…

We compared 2 learning methods for the acquisition of vocabulary in a second language (L2). In addition, the use of the new L2 words was evaluated both in isolation and within sentences. In the semantic method, L2 words and pictures denoting their meanings were presented and participants learned by practicing a semantic categorization task (to…

Word frequency is an important predictor of lexical-decision task performance. The current study further examined the role of this variable by exploring the influence of frequency trajectory. Frequency trajectory is measured by how often a word occurs in childhood relative to adulthood. Past research on the role of this variable in word…

Prior behavioral experiments across a variety of tasks have typically shown that the go/no-go procedure produces not only shorter response times and/or fewer errors than the two-choice procedure, but also yields a higher sensitivity to experimental manipulations. To uncover the time course of information processing in the go/no-go versus the…

Although listening is key to communication, it remains the least studied skill compared to other skills, both at the national and international levels, among learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). There is also often a lack of awareness among scholars and teachers of how listening takes place, how it is best taught, and how it can be…

Recent research has shown that leet words (i.e., words in which some of the letters are replaced by visually similar digits; e.g., VIRTU4L) can be processed as their base words without much cost. However, it remains unclear whether the digits inserted in leet words are simply processed as letters or whether they are simultaneously processed as…

In a series of analyses over mega datasets, Jones, Johns, and Recchia (Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 66(2), 115-124, 2012) and Johns et al. (Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 132:2, EL74-EL80, 2012) found that a measure of contextual diversity that takes into account the semantic variability of a word's contexts provided…

Although previous research has shown that letter position information for the first letter of a parafoveal word is encoded less flexibly than internal word beginning letters (Johnson, Perea & Rayner, 2007; White et al., 2008), it is not clear how positional encoding operates over the initial trigram in English. This experiment explored the…