The research presented in this paper aimed to serve two purposes. First, the objective was to understand the relationship between lexical and grammatical spelling. In this way, we studied how the frequency and consistency of verb interacted with the application of grammatical rules. Second, we investigated the dynamics of spelling during the…

Evaluating creativity of verbal responses or texts is a challenging task due to psychometric issues associated with subjective ratings and the peculiarities of textual data. We explore an approach to objectively assess the creativity of responses in a sentence generation task to (1) better understand what language-related aspects are valued by…

An important question within psycholinguistics is how knowledge of multiple languages impacts the coactivation of word forms and meanings during language comprehension. To the extent that a bilingual's known languages are always partially active, as predicted by models such as the bilingual interactive activation plus model (Dijkstra & Van…

The purpose of this study was to examine the role and nature of phonology in silent reading of Japanese sentences. An experiment was conducted using a Japanese sentence acceptability judgment task. One important finding was that participants more rapidly rejected homophonic sentences in which one two-kanji compound word was replaced by its…

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 present study investigated whether Short Message Service shortcuts are more difficult to process in sentence context than the spelled-out word equivalent and, if so, how any additional processing difficulty arises. Twenty-four student participants read 37 Short Message Service shortcuts and word equivalents embedded in semantically plausible…

Statistical patterns of language use demonstrably affect language comprehension and language production. This study set out to determine whether the variable amount of exposure to such patterns leads to individual differences in reading behavior as measured via eye-movements. Previous studies have demonstrated that more proficient readers are less…

Three experiments examined the role of phonology in the activation of word meanings in Grade 5 students. In Experiment 1, homophone and spelling control errors were embedded in a story context and participants performed a proofreading task as they read for meaning. For both good and poor readers, more homophone errors went undetected than spelling…

The purpose of this research was to understand better how morphemic units are encoded and auto-organised in memory and how they are accessed during writing. We hypothesised that the activation of morphemic units would not depend on rule-based learning during primary school but would be determined by frequency-based learning, which is a process…

This study reports 2 eye-tracking experiments investigating form interference during sentence-level silent reading. The items involved reduced and unreduced relative clauses (RCs) with words that were orthographically and phonologically similar "(injection-infection"; O+P+, Experiment 1) as well as with words that were orthographically…

The lexical quality hypothesis assumes that skilled readers rely on high quality lexical representations that afford autonomous lexical retrieval and reduce the need to rely on top-down context. This experiment investigated this hypothesis by comparing the performance of adults classified on reading comprehension and spelling performance. "Lexical…

In this experiment, syntactic constraints on the retrieval of orthography were investigated using homophones embedded in sentence contexts. Participants typed auditorily presented sentences that included a contextually appropriate homophone that either shared part of speech with its homophone competitor (i.e., was syntactically unambiguous) or had…

Despite the importance of phonemic awareness in beginning literacy, several studies have demonstrated that adults, including teacher trainees, have surprisingly poor phonemic skills. Three experiments investigated whether adults' responses in phonemic awareness and spelling segmentation tasks are based on units larger than single letters and…