We examined how noun frequency and the typicality of surrounding linguistic context contribute to children's real-time comprehension. Monolingual English-learning toddlers viewed pairs of pictures while hearing sentences with typical or atypical sentence frames ("Look at the…" vs. "Examine the…"), followed by nouns that were…

The mirror effect is the finding that in recognition tests, a manipulation that increases the hit rate also decreases the false alarm rate. For example, low frequency words have a higher hit rate and a lower false alarm rate than high frequency words. Because the mirror effect is held to be a regularity of memory, it has had a pronounced influence…

Word identification accuracy is modulated by many factors including linguistic characteristics of words (frequent vs. infrequent), listening environment (noisy vs. quiet), and listener-related differences (older vs. younger). Nearly, all studies investigating these factors use high-familiarity words and noise signals that are either energetic…

During reading, high-frequency words consistently receive shorter fixation durations relative to low-frequency words. However, how frequently a given word is experienced can vary across an individual's education. In the current study, the effects of both childhood and college-level word frequency on fixation durations were examined to assess the…

This study explores the effectiveness of four-word frame training in enhancing the reading comprehension and contextual word-guessing skills of Thai public health students studying English as a Foreign Language. A mixed-methods approach was employed with 22 fourth-year undergraduate students, combining quantitative pre- and post-test assessments…

Children learn high phonological neighbourhood density words more easily than low phonological neighbourhood density words (Storkel, 2004). However, the strength of this effect relative to alternative predictors of word acquisition is unclear. We addressed this issue using communicative inventory data from 300 British English-speaking children…

The words in a language or language variety are often rank ordered in lists that are meant to reflect the relative importance of those words to language users and learners of a language. This rank ordering is done on the basis of the relative prevalence of words in a corpus. Lexical prevalence is often operationalized as measures of frequency,…

Purpose: Morphological regularities are an important feature of the English writing system, and exposure to written morphology may be key in the development of skilled word recognition. Our aim was to investigate children's experiences of written morphology by analyzing a large-scale corpus of children's reading materials spanning a target age…

Common tests of morphological awareness measure both morphology and syntax by requiring participants to fit words and pseudowords into sentences by adding or removing affixes. We report the results of a study testing a new word level task. College students viewed transparent words (without phonological or orthographic shifts) and used a keyboard…

In second language (L2) research, the lexical unit is often defined as a base word plus inflectional and derivational forms through Level 6 of Bauer and Nation's framework (WF6). WF6 use has been justified by the assumption that once a form is known, recognition of other WF6 members requires little extra effort. A more lenient view holds that an…

Central questions in the study of visual word recognition and developmental dyslexia are whether early lexical activation precedes and supports decoding (a dual-stage view) or not (dual-route view), and the locus of deficits in dysfluent reading. The dual-route view predicts early word frequency and length interaction, whereas the dual-stage view…

This study scrutinized the effects of words' superiority, regularity, frequency and length on the intermediate and advanced EFL learner's visual word recognition. Moreover, it attempted to check whether each of these parameters could be statistically a significant predictor on recognition tasks. Accordingly, 118 intermediate and 127 advanced adult…

This study aimed to develop a Vietnamese word recognition test for Taiwanese undergraduate students and to investigate students' performances at different learning stages. The formal test consists of 100 words as test items. With each word, test takers were asked to select the correct Vietnamese word form corresponding to the pronunciation they…

Purpose: The graphic symbol is the foundation of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) for many preliterate individuals; however, research has focused primarily on static graphic symbol sequences despite mainstream commercial technologies such as animation. The goal of this study was to compare static and animated symbol sequences…

Word spacing is important in guiding eye movements during spaced alphabetic reading. Chinese is unspaced and it remains unclear as to how Chinese readers segment and identify words in reading. We conducted two parallel experiments to investigate whether the positional probabilities of the initial and the final characters of a multicharacter word…