The process of spoken word recognition is influenced by both bottom-up sensory information and top-down cognitive information. These cues are used to process the phonological and semantic representations of speech. Several studies have used EEG/ERPs to study the neural mechanisms of children's spoken word recognition, but less is known about the…

Holistic processing (HP) of faces refers to the obligatory, simultaneous processing of the parts and their relations, and it emerges over the course of development. HP is manifest in a decrement in the perception of inverted versus upright faces and a reduction in face processing ability when the relations between parts are perturbed. Here,…

Previous research has shown that early in the word recognition process, there is some degree of uncertainty concerning letter identity and letter position. Here, we examined whether this uncertainty also extends to the mapping of letter features onto letters, as predicted by the Bayesian Reader (Norris & Kinoshita, 2012). Indeed, anecdotal…

Drawing on Geary's (1995) evolution-based model of cognitive and academic development, this study investigated the relation between biologically primary skills (vocabulary, executive functions, and visual-spatial processing) and subsequent word reading and calculation. It also examined the extent to which these relations were mediated by…

It is well established that the comprehension of spoken words referring to object concepts relies on high-level visual areas in the ventral stream that build increasingly abstract representations. It is much less clear whether basic low-level visual representations are also involved. Here we asked in what task situations low-level visual…

In Chinese orthography, the most common character structure consists of a semantic radical on the left and a phonetic radical on the right (SP characters); the minority, opposite arrangement also exists (PS characters). Recent studies showed that SP character processing is more left hemisphere (LH) lateralized than PS character processing.…

Purpose: Reading requires the ability to decode and comprehend. Impairments in working memory (WM) are often implicated in students who are poor decoders. It is unclear whether this is a domain-specific issue or a task-specific issue. Therefore, this study examined how auditory-verbal (AV) WM, visual-spatial (VS) WM, and cognitive load affected…

Words presented to the right visual field (RVF) are recognized more readily than those presented to the left visual field (LVF). Whereas the attentional bias theory proposes an explanation in terms of attentional imbalance between visual fields, the attentional advantage theory assumes that words presented to the RVF are processed automatically…

We report 3 experiments that examined whether presentation of a spoken word creates an attentional bottleneck associated with lexical processing in the absence of a response to that word. A spoken word and a visual stimulus were presented in quick succession, but only the visual stimulus demanded a response. Response times to the visual stimulus…

Research on reading acquisition and on the processes underlying it usually examined reading orally, while silent reading, which is the more common mode of reading, has been rather neglected. As accumulated data suggests that these two modes of reading only partially overlap, our understanding of the natural mode of reading may still be limited.…

The effect of cognitive load (CL) on speech recognition has received little attention despite the prevalence of CL in everyday life, e.g., dual-tasking. To assess the effect of CL on the interaction between lexically-mediated and acoustically-mediated processes, we measured the magnitude of the "Ganong effect" (i.e., lexical bias on phoneme…

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the various neurocognitive processes concomitant to reading by attempting to identify various subtypes of reading disorders in a referred sample. Participants were 216 elementary school students in grades two through five who were given select subtests of the Woodcock Johnson-III Tests of…

Two experiments combined a spatial cueing manipulation (valid vs. invalid spatial cues) with a stimulus repetition manipulation (repeated vs. nonrepeated) in order to assess the hypothesis that familiar items need less spatial attention than less familiar ones. The magnitude of the effect of cueing on reading aloud time for items that were…

Visual speech perception has become a topic of considerable interest to speech researchers. Previous research has demonstrated that perceivers neurally encode and use speech information from the visual modality, and this information has been found to facilitate spoken word recognition in tasks such as lexical decision (Kim, Davis, & Krins,…

The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to determine the degree to which people can process words while devoting central attention to another task. Experiments 1-4 measured the N400 effect, which is sensitive to the degree of mismatch between a word and the current semantic context. Experiment 5 measured the P3 difference between…