In the search for mechanisms that contribute to dyslexia, the term "attention" has been invoked to explain performance in a variety of tasks, creating confusion since all tasks do, indeed, demand "attention." Many studies lack an experimental manipulation of attention that would be necessary to determine its influence on task…

Considerable research effort has been devoted to investigating semantic priming effects, particularly, the locus of those effects. Semantically related primes might activate their target's lexical representation (through automatic spreading activation at short stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), or through generation of words expected to follow…

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…

Successful word recognition requires that listeners attend to differences that are phonemic in the language while also remaining flexible to the variation introduced by different voices and accents. Previous work has demonstrated that American-English-learning 19-month-olds are able to balance these demands: although one-off one-feature…

Two masked priming experiments investigated the impact of prime lexicality (word vs. nonword) and the pseudo-morphological structure of prime stimuli (pseudosuffixed vs. nonsuffixed) on embedded word priming effects. In the related prime conditions, target words were embedded at the beginning of prime stimuli and were followed either by a…

We investigated toddlers' phonological representations of common vowel-initial words that can take on multiple surface forms in the input. In French, liaison consonants are inserted and are syllabified as onsets in subsequent vowel-initial words, for example, petit /t/ éléphant [little elephant]. We aimed to better understand the impact on…

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…

We assessed the effect of bilingualism on metacognitive processing in the artificial language learning task, in 2 experiments varying in the difficulty to segment the language. Following a study phase in which participants were exposed to the artificial language, segmentation performance was assessed by means of a dual forced-choice recognition…

Previous studies on spoken word production have shown that native English speakers used phoneme-sized units (e.g., a word-initial phoneme, C) to produce English words, and native Mandarin Chinese speakers employed syllable-sized units (e.g., a word-initial consonant and vowel, CV) as phonological encoding units in Chinese. With spoken word…

On the evidence of four lexical-decision tasks in German, we examine speakers' sensitivity to internal morphological composition and abstract morphological rules during the processing of derived words, real and novel. In a lexical-decision task with delayed priming, speakers were presented with two-step derived nouns such as "Heilung…

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a "contrastive context" facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used…

This study investigated how adult second language (L2) learners of Mandarin Chinese use knowledge of phonological and lexical statistical regularities when acoustic information is insufficient for word recognition. A gating task was used to test intermediate L2 learners at two time points across a semester of classroom learning. Native Mandarin…

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…

There has been an increasing volume of evidence supporting the role of the syllable in word processing tasks. Recently it has also been shown that orthographic redundancy, related to the pattern of bigram frequencies, could not explain the syllable number effect on lexical decision times. This was demonstrated on a large sample of words taken from…

The memorial costs and benefits of trial-and-error learning have clear pedagogical implications for students, and increasing evidence shows that generating errors during episodic learning can improve memory among younger adults. Conversely, the aging literature has found that errors impair memory among healthy older adults and has advocated for…