Comprehension of stories requires readers to take the perspective of the story characters and imagine or feel their cognitive and affective states. The study investigated how variations in emotional valence within a literary text affected readers' global text processing, as reflected in their eye movements during the first and second-pass reading,…

This study investigated how experience with a first language (L1) writing system affects the development of the second language (L2) word recognition subskills and how L2 linguistic knowledge constrains such L1 impacts. In this study, word recognition is conceptualized as a complex construct that entails multiple subskills necessary for…

There is concern that the violations of conventional grammar (both accidental and deliberate) often seen in text messages (e.g., "hi [smiley face emoticon] how is ya?!!") could lead to difficulty in learning or remembering formal grammatical conventions. We examined whether the grammatical violations made by 244 British children,…

Thai has its own distinctive alphabetic script with syllabic characteristics as it has implicit vowels for some consonants. Consonants are written in a linear order, but vowels can be written non-linearly above, below or to either side of the consonant. Of particular interest to the current study are that vowels can precede the consonant in…

The morpho-syllabic Japanese writing system consists of the phonetic scripts of hiragana and katakana, the logographic kanji derived from Chinese characters and the less well researched romaji based on the Roman alphabet. In four experiments we investigated the speed with which Japanese college students read, named, and transcribed romaji as…