This study investigates the performance of adults with cerebrovascular lesion in the right hemisphere (RHL) or left hemisphere (LHL) in word reading (TLPP) and spelling (TEPP) tasks based on the dual-route models. A total of 85 adults were assessed, divided into three groups: 10 with RHL, 15 with LHL, and 60 neurologically healthy ones. The…

It is considerably harder to generalize identity across different pictures of unfamiliar faces, compared with familiar faces. This finding hints strongly at qualitatively distinct processing of unfamiliar face stimuli--for which we have less expertise. Yet, the extent to which face selective versus generic visual processes drive outcomes during…

This paper explores the nature of copula omission in Cypriot Greek individuals with Down Syndrome (DS). Previous studies on DS have attributed high rates of copula omission to an overall grammatical/inflectional impairment without offering further analysis. In order to identify relevant conditioning factors, we examined copula productions and…

Music performance is an intensive sensorimotor task that involves the generation of mental representations of musical information that are actively accessed, maintained, and manipulated according to the demands of the performance. Internal representations and external information interact through feedback and feedforward processes that adjust the…

Introduction: Spelling difficulty is a common symptom of aphasia and can entail editing difficulties. Previous research has shown that extensive editing is related to a lower production rate in text writing for persons with aphasia, yet editing difficulty is not commonly examined. It is not known if editing difficulty is related to reading and…

This paper reports an experiment that investigates interpretive distinctions between two different expressions of generalization in Spanish. In particular, our aim was to find out when the distinction between generic statements (GS) such as "Tigers have stripes" and universally quantified statements (UQS) such as "All tigers have…

Some people with autism spectrum disorders have been observed to experience difficulties with making correct inferences in conversations in social situations. However, the nature and origin of their problem is rarely investigated. This study used manipulations of video stimuli to investigate two questions. The first question was whether it is the…

Two studies investigated the effects of errors in German business letters written by Dutch students. Gaining insight into these effects is important since Germany and the Netherlands are one of the largest economically interdependent partnerships. One hundred and fifty-six German professionals rated letters with errors and letters without errors…

The purpose of this study is to describe the errors made by Turks living in Sydney, Australia in Turkish written texts. The mistakes identified in the texts were handled with the error analysis approach and evaluated according to their linguistic, cognitive processing, communicative, spelling and punctuation characteristics. Content analysis…

Perspective-taking plays an important role in daily life, allowing consideration of other people's perspectives and viewpoints. This study used a large sample of 265 community-based participants (aged 20-86 years) to examine changes in perspective-taking abilities--a component of "Theory of Mind"--across adulthood, and how these changes…

Mobile phone technology is becoming ubiquitous. However, a number of unique usability challenges are still unresolved, including small screen size, device orientation changes, and an array of interaction methods (tap, flick, pinch, etc.) These challenges may be particularly acute for people with learning disabilities. This study examined the…

Our study examines written corrective feedback generated by two online grammar checkers (GCs), Grammarly and Virtual Writing Tutor, and by the grammar checking function of Microsoft Word. We tested the technology on a wide range of grammatical error types from two sources: a set of authentic ESL compositions and a series of simple sentences we…

This study investigates the effect of Facebook on Arabic language attrition, i.e., decrease in language proficiency, as exhibited in the use of Colloquial instead of Standard Arabic, use of foreign words although Arabic equivalents exist, and committing spelling errors. A sample of Facebook posts and a corpus of spelling errors on Facebook were…

Speech errors typically respect the speaker's implicit knowledge of language-wide phonotactics (e.g., /t/ cannot be a syllable onset in the English language). Previous work demonstrated that adults can learn novel experimentally induced phonotactic constraints by producing syllable strings in which the allowable position of a phoneme depends on…

In this experiment, the extent to which beginning readers process phonology during lexical identification in silent sentence reading was investigated. The eye movements of children aged seven to nine years and adults were recorded as they read sentences containing either a correctly spelled target word (e.g., girl), a pseudohomophone (e.g., gerl),…