The present study examined the relative effectiveness of bilingual subtitles for L2 viewing comprehension, compared to other subtitling types. Learners' allocation of attention to the image and subtitles/captions in different viewing conditions, as well as the relationship between attention and comprehension, were also investigated. A total of 112…

The present research aimed to investigate whether, as previously observed with pictures, background auditory rhythm would also influence visual word recognition. In a lexical decision task, participants were presented with bisyllabic visual words, segmented into two successive groups of letters, while an irrelevant strongly metric auditory…

Reading is acutely sensitive to the amount of space between letters within a string. In the present investigation, we explore the impairment caused by increasing interletter spacing when reading single words and nonwords aloud. Specifically, 2 hypotheses are tested: (a) whether increasing interletter spacing induces serial processing while reading…

E. Dhooge and R. J. Hartsuiker (2010) reported experiments showing that picture naming takes longer with low- than high-frequency distractor words, replicating M. Miozzo and A. Caramazza (2003). In addition, they showed that this distractor-frequency effect disappears when distractors are masked or preexposed. These findings were taken to refute…

Contrary to the received view that reading aloud reflects processes that are "automatic," recent evidence suggests that some of these processes require a form of attention. This issue was investigated further by examining the effect of a prior presentation of exception words (words whose spelling-sound translation are atypical, such as pint as…

Background: This study investigates the effects of two dimensions of attentional functioning, sustained focus of attention and resource capacity/allocation, on the real-time processing of simple sentences by children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing (TD) children matched for age. Methods & Procedures: Thirty-six…

Stroop dilution is the reduction of the Stroop effect in the presence of a neutral word. It has been attributed to competition for attention between the color word and neutral word, to competition between all stimuli in the visual field, and to perceptual interference. Five experiments tested these accounts. The critical manipulation was whether…

A dual-task paradigm was used to assess attentional processing demands during visual word recognition. By manipulating the difficulty of each task, it is argued that the procedure estimates the attention demands of the memory-access component of word recognition. (Editor)

In two experiments, a probe technique required subjects to respond when the digit 7 appeared in one of five-letter positions in words or nonwords, inserted at the onset and 500 msec after letter and word processing. The focus of attention given to a letter has a smaller spatial extent. (Author/CM)

The Posner-Snyder two-process theory of expectancy explains results of studies on the effect of sentence context on ongoing word recognition. Three studies tested the applicability of the theory to the performance of fluent adult readers. Difficult words displayed larger context effects than did easy words. (Author/RD)

Individual differences in context effects both in a word-level task and in a sentence-level task were found to be related to individual differences in reading continuous text. These results are presented within the framework of a verification model, and the implications for two-process theory are discussed. (Author/PN)

The effect of the sensory discriminability of targets from nontargets on depth of nontarget processing was examined. Depth of nontarget processing was measured by semantic overlap between targets and nontargets, reaction time, and nontarget recall. Depth of processing decreased as sensory discriminability increased, supporting multiple-loci…

This study focused on two questions concerning children's attention to verbal stimulus: How do children of different reading ability attend to repeatedly presented words? Are there differences in children's patterns of attention to words as compared to less meaningful materials? Toward the end of an academic year, 40 first-graders and 40…