We introduce a novel method to test a classic idea in developmental science that children's attention to a stimulus is driven by how much they can learn from it. Preschoolers (4-6 years, M=4.6) watched a video where a distracting animation accompanied static, page-by-page illustrations of a storybook. The audio narration for each storybook page…

Reading numbers aloud involves visual processes that analyze the digit string and verbal processes that produce the number words. Cognitive models of number reading assume that information flows from the visual input to the verbal production processes--a feed-forward processing mode in which the verbal production depends on the visual input but…

Soares, Lages, Oliveira, and Cabrera-Hernández (2019) recently showed that the mirror-letter interference effect observed for words containing reversal letters was reliable for words containing left-oriented mirror-letters as 'd', but not for words containing right-oriented mirror-letters as 'b', thus indicating that the directionality of the…

Discourse-based interviews (DBIs) uncover tacit knowledge within written composing processes. Existing visual research methodologies offer tools for a necessary expansion of DBI to the study of tacit knowledge in visual and multimodal texts. This article outlines a feminist application of eye tracking as a visual research method used in…

Statistical learning (SL) plays a key role in literacy acquisition. Studies have increasingly revealed the influence of distributional statistical properties of words on visual word processing, including the effects of word frequency (lexical level) and mappings between orthography, phonology, and semantics (sub-lexical level). However, there has…

This study aimed to determine how Chinese children adapt to Chinese orthography-phonology correspondence by acquiring phonetic radical awareness (PRA). This study used two important Chinese encoding approaches (rote and orthographic approaches) as the developmental trajectory, in which the present study hypothesized that phonological awareness…

This study aimed to determine the variables affecting the eye-movements of second-language (L2) learners of Turkish in Türkiye while solving a test consisting of questions that included graphics. A total of 115 L2 learners participated in the research (21 in the pilot study and 94 in the main study). We presented a test consisting of five…

Purpose: There is a long-standing debate about how written words are recognized. Central to this debate is the role of phonology. The objective of this study is to contribute to our collective understanding regarding the role of phonology in written word recognition. Method: A total of 30 monolingual adults were tested using a novel written word…

Previous researchers have taught sighted adults to match braille sample stimuli to print comparisons in a matching-to-sample (MTS) format and assessed the emergence of other braille repertoires, such as transcribing and reading braille following this training. Although participants learned to match to sample with braille, they displayed limited…

When Virtual Reality (VR) is used to present learning content, the three-dimensional image is often not sufficient and additional text is required, either in the form of visual or auditory text. Such additional instructional text could be particularly beneficial due to the many visual stimuli and the risk of visual working memory overload.…

In four experiments, we investigated the impact of letter case (lower case vs. UPPER CASE) on the processing of sequences of written words. Experiment 1 used the rapid parallel visual presentation (RPVP) paradigm with postcued identification of one word in a five-word sequence. The sequence could be grammatically correct (e.g., "the boy likes…

The aim of the study was to focus on whether visual processing differs between distinct levels of reading competence in young adults, from a regular orthography. We compared the 10% highest scoring (HRC) and the 10% lowest scoring groups (LRC) of reading competence (using the word chain test, WCT) in visual processing of global coherent motion and…

The goal of the paper was to investigate whether morphological units -- stems and suffixes -- influence orthographic processing by modulating visual attention demands to the task. Orthographic processing was measured with a visual one-back task requiring letters to be detected within pseudowords not including stems/suffixes, or containing real…

This study tested the effect of constraining sentence context on word recognition time (RT) in the first and second language. Native (L1) and nonnative (L2) speakers of English performed self-paced reading and listening tasks to see whether a semantically-rich preceding context would lead to the activation of a probable upcoming word prior to…

Using the oral and manual Stroop tasks we tested the claim that retrieval of meaning from a written word is automatic, in the sense that it cannot be controlled. The semantic interference effect (greater interference caused by color-related words than color-neutral words) was used as the index of semantic activation. To manipulate the level of…