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…

While research has repeatedly found evidence that readers infer characters' emotions, we investigate three outstanding questions about the content and time course of such inferences. We ask whether even simple narratives give rise to emotion inferences, in what form such inferences are encoded into long-term memory, and whether they are uniquely…

In 2 ERP experiments participants read 4-word sequences presented for 200 ms (RPVP paradigm) and were required to decide whether the word sequences were grammatical or not. In Experiment 1, the word sequence consisted of either a grammatically correct sentence (e.g., "she can sing now") or an ungrammatical scrambled sequence (e.g.,…

We present computational modeling results based on a self-paced reading study investigating number attraction effects in Eastern Armenian. We implement three novel computational models of agreement attraction in a Bayesian framework and compare their predictive fit to the data using k-fold cross-validation. We find that our data are better…

In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the processing of information about phonological consistency of Chinese phonograms during sentence reading. In Experiment 1, we adopted the error disruption paradigm in silent reading and found significant effects of phonological consistency and homophony in the foveal vision, but only in a late…

Children with reading difficulties (RD) share challenges in executive functions (EF). Neurobiological correlates provide evidence for EF challenges during reading among these readers, but an online cognitive load detection mechanism has yet to be developed. Nevertheless, eye-movement tracking can provide online data of reading patterns (pupil…

Background: Disruptions of reading processes due to text substitutions can measure how readers use lexical information. Methods: With eye-movement recording, children and adults viewed sentences with either identical, orthographically similar, homophonic or unrelated substitutions of the first characters in target words. To the extent that readers…

The current study investigated whether shared phonology across languages activates cross-language meaning when reading in context. Eighty-five bilinguals read English sentences while their eye movements were tracked. Critical sentences contained English members of English-French interlingual homophone pairs (e.g., "mow"; French homophone…

The morphological structure of the word has a central function in the organization of the mental lexicon and word recognition. Polymorphemic words in Arabic are composed of two non-concatenated morphemes: root and word-pattern. This study is the first to address the issue of nominal-pattern priming among young developing Arabic speakers. I…

An investigation into the impact of predictive text use upon the literacy skills of primary school, secondary school and university cohorts was conducted over the course of a year. No differences in use of text abbreviations ("textisms") were found between predictive text users and nonusers. However, secondary school children who used…

This research examines the acquisition of letter-position processing. Study 1 investigated letter-position processing in Grades 1-6 and adult readers, using the occurrence of specific error types as the outcome measure. Between Grades 1 and 2, there was a shift from making more other-word to making more letter-position errors. This shift was a…

This paper compares the oral reading errors between the contextual sentences and random words among schoolchildren. Two sets of reading materials were developed to test the oral reading errors in 30 schoolchildren (10.00±1.44 years). Set A was comprised contextual sentences while Set B encompassed random words. The schoolchildren were asked to…

The present study aimed to examine the relationship between letter processing and word processing skills in deaf and hearing readers. The participants were 105 students (51 of them hearing, 54 of them deaf) who were evenly and randomly recruited from two levels of education (primary = 3rd-4th graders; middle = 6th-7th graders). The students were…

Dual route models of reading suggest there are 2 pathways for reading words: an orthographic-lexical pathway, used to read familiar regular words and exception words, and a grapheme-to-phoneme-conversion-(GPC)-sublexical pathway, used to read unfamiliar regular words, pseudohomophones (PHs), and nonwords. It is unclear, however, whether PHs…

This article reports a lexical-decision experiment that was conducted to investigate the impact of word stress on visual word recognition in German. Reaction-time latencies and error rates of German readers on different levels of reading proficiency (i.e., third graders and fifth graders from primary school and university students) were compared…