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 in alphabetic languages has shown that both position (external, internal) and distance (adjacent, nonadjacent) modulate letter position encoding during reading. To examine the generality of this pattern for a comprehensive model of word recognition and reading, we examined these effects during Chinese reading (i.e., an unspaced…

The present study addresses word recognition automaticity in Spanish-speaking adults who are neoliterate by assessing the event-related potential N170 for word stimuli. Participants engaged in two reading conditions that vary the degree of attention required for linguistic components of reading: (a) an implicit reading task, in which they detected…

Background: Word learning is an important component of language development that influences child outcomes across multiple domains. Despite the importance of word knowledge, word-learning mechanisms are poorly understood in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study examined…

Rehearsal strategies of adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) and demographically matched typically developed (TD) adults were strategically manipulated by cueing participants to either learn, or forget each list word prior to a recognition task. Participants were also asked to distinguish between autonoetic and noetic states of awareness…

This study highlights differences in cognitive strategies in children and adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorders (n = 52) on a verbal fluency task (naming as many words as possible (e.g. animals) within 60 s). The ability to form clusters of words (e.g. farm animals like "cow-horse-goat") or to switch between unrelated…

Recent research has shown contextual diversity (i.e., the number of passages in which a given word appears) to be a reliable predictor of word processing difficulty. It has also been demonstrated that word-frequency has little or no effect on word recognition speed when accounting for contextual diversity in isolated word processing tasks. An…

Effects of lexical and sublexical variables on visual word recognition are often treated as homogeneous across participants and stable over time. In this study, we examine the modulation of frequency, length, syllable and bigram frequency, orthographic neighborhood, and graphophonemic consistency effects by (a) individual differences, and (b) item…

Many deaf students encounter great difficulty in learning to read. Typically, research has cited deaf students' difficulties to use phonological processing as the source of their reading deficit. However, recent studies have shown that morphological processing also plays an important part in reading. Since morphological units are visually…

The present study presents a comparison of the cognitive inhibition abilities of dyslexic, dyscalculic, and control students. The participants were 45 dyslexic students, 45 dyscalculic students, and 45 age-, gender-, and IQ-matched control students. The major evaluation tools included six cognitive inhibition tasks which were restructured during…

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…

This article reviews the results of a meta-analysis of the experimental published literature that compares the academic, cognitive, and behavioral performance of adults with reading disabilities (RD) with average achieving adult readers. The meta-analysis shows that deficits independent of the classification measures emerged for adults with RD on…

Adults with phonological dyslexia and controls performed a lexical decision task while ERPs were recorded in the occipitotemporal pathway. Based on N170 durations, two subgroups were formed: dysl1 showing longer N170 durations and dysl2 showing normal N170 durations. While the dysl1 subgroup had poorer accuracy for infrequent words and…

The roles of linguistic, cognitive, and social-pragmatic processes in word learning are well established. If statistical mechanisms also contribute to word learning, they must interact with these processes; however, there exists little evidence for such mechanistic synergy. Adults use co-occurrence statistics to encode speech-object pairings with…

The present study explored when and how the top-down intention to speak influences the language production process. We did so by comparing the brain's electrical response for a variable known to affect lexical access, namely word frequency, during overt object naming and non-verbal object categorization. We found that during naming, the…