The morphological structure of complex words impacts how they are processed during visual word recognition. This impact varies over the course of reading acquisition and for different languages and writing systems. Many theories of morphological processing rely on a decomposition mechanism, in which words are decomposed into explicit…

The statistical structure of a given language likely drives our sensitivity to words' morphological structure. The current work begins to investigate to what degree morphological processing effects observed in visual word recognition can be attributed to statistical regularities between orthography and semantics in English, without any prior…

In this secondary analysis study, the authors explored the relations between reading comprehension and oral reading performance in fourth-grade students, using a data set from the U.S. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) special study of oral reading. The data set consisted of 1,713 students randomly selected from the 140,000 fourth…

This article examines current research on the role and importance of lower-level processes in second language (L2) reading. The focus is on word recognition and its subcomponent processes, including various phonological and orthographic processes. Issues related to syntactic and semantic processes and their relationship with word recognition are…

Reading-related skills of youth with intellectual disability (ID) were compared with those of typically developing (TD) children of similar verbal ability level. The group with ID scored lower than the TD group on word recognition and phonological decoding, but similarly on orthographic processing and rapid automatized naming (RAN). Further,…

This study aimed at examining sensitivity to lateral linguistic and nonlinguistic information in third and fifth grade readers. A word identification task with a threshold was used, and targets were displayed foveally with or without distractors. Sensitivity to lateral information was inferred from the deterioration of the rate of correct word…

We present an MEG study of homonym recognition in reading, identifying effects of a semantic measure of homonym ambiguity. This measure sheds light on two competing theories of lexical access: the "early access" theory, which entails that lexical access occurs at early (pre 200 ms) stages of processing; and the "late access" theory, which…

In recent years, some researchers have proposed that a fundamental component of the word recognition process is that each fovea is divided precisely at its vertical midline and that information either side of this midline projects to different, contralateral hemispheres. Thus, when a word is fixated, all letters to the left of the point of…

Recent research using word recognition paradigms, such as lexical decision and speeded pronunciation, has investigated how a range of variables affect the location and shape of response time distributions, using both parametric and non-parametric techniques. In this article, we explore the distributional effects of a word frequency manipulation on…

According to Gough and Tunmer's Simple View of Reading, Reading Comprehension = Decoding (D) x Listening Comprehension (C). The purpose of this study was to evaluate the model with a sample of First Nations children, known to have average decoding and listening comprehension but poor reading comprehension. In addition, the authors examined the…

The present study focussed on the determinants for effective solving of the Wordchains Test (WCT) in a normative sample of Norwegian junior high-school students. Forty voluntary participants from a rural school district in Western Norway completed the WCT along with tests of general intellectual capacity, single word and non-word reading, auditory…

Recent research has indicated that phonological neighbors speed processing in a variety of isolated word recognition tasks. Nevertheless, as these tasks do not represent how we normally read, it is not clear if phonological neighborhood has an effect on the reading of sentences for meaning. In the research reported here, we evaluated whether…

Skilled readers were trained to recognise either the oral (n=44) or visual form (n=40) of a set of 32 novel words (oral and visual instantiation, respectively). Training involved learning the "meanings" for the instantiated words and was followed by a visual lexical decision task in which the instantiated words were mixed with real English words…

There are numerous reports in the visual word recognition literature that the joint effects of various factors are additive on reaction time. A central claim by D. C. Plaut and J. R. Booth (2000, 2006) is that their parallel distributed processing model simulates additive effects of stimulus quality and word frequency in the context of lexical…

Models of visual word recognition have been assessed by both factorial and regression approaches. Factorial approaches tend to provide a relatively weak test of models, and regression approaches give little indication of the sources of models' mispredictions, especially when parameters are not optimal. A new alternative method, involving…