Color terms divide the color spectrum differently across languages. Previous studies have reported that speakers of languages that have different words for light and dark blue (e.g., Russian "siniy" and "goluboy") discriminate color chips sampled from these two linguistic categories faster than speakers of languages that use…

Purpose: Studies on reading in individuals with severe-to-profound hearing loss (deaf) raise the possibility that, due to deficient phonological coding, deaf individuals may rely more on orthographic-semantic links than on orthographic-phonological links. However, the relative contribution of phonological and semantic information to visual word…

Previous research has shown that processing words with an up/down association (e.g., bird, foot) can influence the subsequent identification of visual targets in congruent location (at the top/bottom of the screen). However, as facilitation and interference were found under similar conditions, the nature of the underlying mechanisms remained…

According to a recent hypothesis, the CV pattern (i.e., the arrangement of consonant and vowel letters) constrains the mental representation of letter strings, with each vowel or vowel cluster being the core of a unit. Six experiments with the same/different task were conducted to test whether this structure is extracted prelexically. In the…

We employ a linear mixed-effects model to estimate the effects of visual form and the linguistic properties of Chinese characters on M100 and M170 MEG responses from single-trial data of Chinese and English speakers in a Chinese lexical decision task. Cortically constrained minimum-norm estimation is used to compute the activation of M100 and M170…

The debate regarding the role of ventral occipito-temporal cortex (vOTC) in visual word recognition arises, in part, from difficulty delineating the functional contributions of vOTC as separate from other areas of the reading network. Here, we investigated the feasibility of using TMS to interfere with vOTC processing in order to explore its…

Decision-makers effortlessly balance the need for urgency against the need for caution. Theoretical and neurophysiological accounts have explained this tradeoff solely in terms of the "quantity" of evidence required to trigger a decision (the "threshold"). This explanation has also been used as a benchmark test for evaluating…

A 2-layer symbolic network model based on the equilibrium equations of the Rescorla-Wagner model (Danks, 2003) is proposed. The study first presents 2 experiments in Serbian, which reveal for sentential reading the inflectional paradigmatic effects previously observed by Milin, Filipovic Durdevic, and Moscoso del Prado Martin (2009) for unprimed…

Two divided visual field priming experiments examined cerebral asymmetries for understanding metaphors varying in sentence constraint. Experiment 1 investigated ambiguous words (e.g., SWEET and BRIGHT) with literal and metaphoric meanings in ambiguous and unambiguous sentence contexts, while Experiment 2 involved standard metaphors (e.g., "The…

Groups of Grade 3 children were tested on measures of word-level literacy and undertook tasks that required the ability to associate sounds with letter sequences and that involved visual, auditory and phonological-processing skills. These groups came from different language backgrounds in which the language of instruction was Arabic, Chinese,…

The experiment reported here investigated the sensitivity of concreteness effects to orthographic neighborhood density and frequency in the visual lexical decision task. The concreteness effect was replicated with a sample of concrete and abstract words that were not matched for orthographic neighborhood features and in which concrete words turned…

Suggests that the role of phonology may be more limited when reading text in Japanese relative to English, and that this difference is not due to variations in orthographic depth. Proposes key factors are the greater visual discriminability of kanji words under degraded conditions and the less important role of word order as a syntactic cue. (SR)

In order to test hypotheses derived from the concept that grammatical, syntactic, semantic, and contextual cues affect the degree of reading comprehension in a visual display, the present investigation was undertaken using the French language. The subjects were approximately 30 college students in a second-semester elementary French course. Five…

Reports on a study that investigated the perception in deaf children, aged 6 to 10, of American Sign Language signs that differ in only one major parameter to determine whether any of the three parameters (handshape, movement, and location) is more difficult than others for deaf children to discriminate. (SED)

The effects of orthographic regularity and visual familiarity on internal coding and processing of visual stimuli were investigated in four experiments using college student subjects. Consistent effects of orthography on the activation of all codes were found. Familiarity influenced semantic more than phonetic codes. Implications for reading…