Decades of psycholinguistics research have shown that human sentence processing is highly incremental and predictive. This has provided evidence for expectation-based theories of sentence processing, which posit that the processing difficulty of linguistic material is modulated by its probability in context. However, these theories do not make…

The present paper derives from a PhD study investigating the nexus between Grade 4 textbook vocabulary demands and Grade 3 isiXhosa-speaking learners' knowledge of that vocabulary to enable them to read to learn in Grade 4. The paper challenges the efficacy of the four current definitions of "word" for generating high frequency words…

This study investigated the word recognition processes of readers of Chinese as a native language (L1) and as a second language (L2), focusing on the effects of two factors, word familiarity and word structure difficulty (complexity of orthographic symbol), on reading accuracy and response time. Subjects were in three groups: (1) 14 adult native…