The ability to predict future events in the environment and learn from them is a fundamental component of adaptive behavior across species. Here we propose that inferring predictions facilitates speech processing and word learning in the early stages of language development. Twelve- and 24-month olds' electrophysiological brain responses to heard…

When children hear a novel word in a context presenting a novel object and a familiar one, they usually assume that the novel word refers to the novel object. In a series of experiments, we tested whether this behavior would be found when 2-year-olds interpreted novel words that differed phonologically from familiar words in only 1 sound, either a…

Sequential regression was used to evaluate whether language-related working memory components uniquely predict reading and writing achievement beyond cognitive-linguistic translation for students in Grades 4 through 9 (N = 103) with specific learning disabilities (SLDs) in subword handwriting (dysgraphia, n = 25), word reading and spelling…

Using a picture pointing task, this study examines toddlers' processing of phonological alternations that trigger sound changes in connected speech. Three experiments investigate whether 2;5- to 3-year-old children take into account assimilations--processes by which phonological features of one sound spread to adjacent sounds--for the purpose of…

The roles of linguistic, cognitive, and social-pragmatic processes in word learning are well established. If statistical mechanisms also contribute to word learning, they must interact with these processes; however, there exists little evidence for such mechanistic synergy. Adults use co-occurrence statistics to encode speech-object pairings with…

Early on during word recognition, letter positions are not accurately coded. Evidence for this comes from transposed-letter (TL) priming effects, in which letter strings generated by transposing two adjacent letters (e.g., "jugde") produce large priming effects, more than primes with the letters replaced in the corresponding position (e.g.,…

An orthographically similar masked nonword prime facilitates responding in a lexical decision task (Forster & Davis, 1984). Recently, this masked priming paradigm has been used to evaluate models of orthographic coding--models that attempt to quantify prime-target similarity. One general finding is that priming effects often do not occur when…

The forms of words as they appear in text and speech are central to theories and models of lexical processing. Nonetheless, current methods for simulating their learning and representation fail to approach the scale and heterogeneity of real wordform lexicons. A connectionist architecture termed the "sequence encoder" is used to learn…

According to parallel distributed processing (PDP) models of visual word recognition, the speed of semantic coding is modulated by the nature of the orthographic-to-semantic mappings. Consistent with this idea, an ambiguity disadvantage and a relatedness-of-meaning (ROM) advantage have been reported in some word recognition tasks in which semantic…

Consistent with converging experimental evidence, we assume that foveal information is initially split across the two cerebral hemispheres. We have previously presented the SERIOL model of letter-position coding, which specifies how the resulting two halves of a letter string are integrated into an abstract representation of letter order. This…

Five theories of how letter position is coded are contrasted: position-specific slot-coding, Wickelcoding, open-bigram coding (discrete and continuous), and spatial coding. These theories make different predictions regarding the relative similarity of three different types of pairs of letter strings: substitution neighbors,…

This study examined effects of word writing on second language vocabulary learning. In two experiments, English-speaking learners of Spanish attempted to learn 24 Spanish nouns while viewing word-picture pairs. The participants copied 12 target words and wrote nothing for the other 12 target words being studied. Productive vocabulary learning on…

Nonwords created by transposing two "adjacent" letters (i.e., transposed-letter (TL) nonwords like "jugde") are very effective at activating the lexical representation of their base words. This fact poses problems for most computational models of word recognition (e.g., the interactive-activation model and its extensions), which assume that exact…

This study used neuroimaging and behavioral techniques to examine the claim that processing capacity limitations underlie specific language impairment (SLI). Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate verbal working memory in adolescents with SLI and normal language (NL) controls. The experimental task involved a modified…