This paper provides a short overview of current issues in research on continuous reading in non-Roman orthographies. At the same time it also serves as an introduction to the present Reading and Writing Special Issue on this topic. The main questions examined in the contributions to this volume are closely related to issues that have been central…

Creativity has emerged in the focus of neurocognitive research in the past decade. However, a heterogeneous pattern of brain areas has been implicated as underpinning the neural correlates of creativity. One explanation for these divergent findings lies in the fact that creativity is not usually investigated in terms of its many underlying…

The present study addresses the question whether accentuation and prosodic phrasing can have a similar function, namely, to group words in a sentence together. Participants listened to locally ambiguous sentences containing object- and subject-control verbs while ERPs were measured. In Experiment 1, these sentences contained a prosodic break,…

Research suggests that concepts are distributed across brain regions specialized for processing information from different sensorimotor modalities. Multimodal semantic models fall into one of two broad classes differentiated by the assumed hierarchy of convergence zones over which information is integrated. In shallow models, communication within-…

The advent of Web 2.0, also called the Social Web, has changed the way people interact with the Web. Assisted by the technologies associated with this new trend, users now play a much more active role as content providers. This Web paradigm shift has also changed how companies operate and interact with their employees, partners and customers. The…

In four experiments, we investigated whether masked stimuli in priming experiments are subjected to early or to late selection. In Experiment 1, participants classified four target-pictures as being small or large. In line with early selection accounts, prime-pictures with a different perceptual appearance as the experienced targets did not elicit…

Many models have hypothesized that multimedia comprehension requires the concurrent processing of verbal and visuospatial information by limited information processing systems. However, in spite of the emphasis devoted to the concurrent processing of verbal and visuospatial information, little research has so far investigated the specific role…

Discusses the possibility of storing a compressed form of a translated version of a text that takes advantage of the availability of the original version for more accurate understanding. Experiments that used humans and then computers to predict texts letter by letter are described. (12 references) (LRW)

Undergraduates read a passage describing social groupings of fish, their color, depth, size and diet. Subjects concurrently viewed a graphic organizer (GO) presenting this information in a matrix-like format. Half the GOs were semantically congruent with the text, organized according to social grouping; the others were spatially organized.…

Event-related potential (ERP) studies have shown that emotional stimuli elicit greater amplitude late positive-polarity potentials (LPPs) than neutral stimuli. This effect has been attributed to arousal, but emotional stimuli are also more semantically coherent than uncategorized neutral stimuli. ERPs were recorded during encoding of positive,…

Four new military training systems offer the opportunity for the application of cognitive science. They are the following: (1) a family of memorization games; (2) a simulator with a graphic, schematic student interface; (3) a system for solving problems of relative motion; and (4) a method of building cognitive skills for air-intercept control.…

Explores what might be the optimal query expansion (QE) processing method with semantically coded thesauri. Examines whether QE via semantically coded thesauri terminology is more effective in the "automatic" or "interactive" processing environment. Results revealed that synonyms and partial synonyms and narrower terms are…

Describes the logical construction of several Russian hypertext systems, and discusses the navigational algorithms used, nodes selected, and coherence demanded. Several illustrative graphs are included, and an overview of the development of linking structures producing logical-semantic models is given. (20 references) (EA)

Presents an approach for dynamic database integration and query processing in the absence of information about attribute correspondences and global IDs. Defines different types of equivalence conditions for the construction of global IDs. Proposes a strategy based on ranked role-sets that makes use of an automated semantic integration procedure…

Discusses language comprehension and describes a technology for computer-aided text analysis called READWARE and software from the READWARE family called the Research Assistant that measures the relatedness of words or phrases by examining their letters. The theory of Letter Semantics is explained, and paradigms for text processing in information…