The present study examined visual word recognition processes in Hebrew (a Semitic language) among beginning learners whose first language (L1) was either Semitic (Arabic) or Indo-European (e.g. English). To examine if learners, like native Hebrew speakers, exhibit morphological sensitivity to root and word-pattern morphemes, learners made an…

What helps us determine whether a word is a noun or a verb, without conscious awareness? We report on cues in the way individual English words are spelled, and, for the first time, identify their neural correlates via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We used a lexical decision task with trisyllabic nouns and verbs containing…

The influence of lexical stress and/or metrical stress on spoken word recognition was examined. Two experiments were designed to determine whether response times in lexical decision or shadowing tasks are influenced when primes and targets share lexical stress patterns (JUVenile-BIBlical [Syllables printed in capital letters indicate those…

Describes a semantic content recognition process based on relatively small sets of context relators, logical relators, phase and state relators, and aspect relators, which are connecting tools in describing meanings in process of concept formation and human communication. Semantic analysis of textual data by computer is tested for feasibility.…

Orthogonally manipulated three word characteristics in Dutch and English--word imageability; word frequency; and cognate status--and obtained similar data patterns for three groups of bilinguals different from one another in second-language fluency. Findings indicate that "concept mediation" is a universal process in translating words…

A study investigated differences in English word recognition in native speakers of Indonesian (an alphabetic language) and Chinese (a logographic languages) learning English as a Second Language. Results largely confirmed the hypothesis that an alphabetic first language would predict better word recognition in speakers of an alphabetic language,…

Cloze procedure, a testing method which systematically deletes words in written prose and then measures the accuracy of the information is reviewed from a historical viewpoint. Redundancy is placed in a verbal context and can be noted on three separate levels of language: (1) surface syntactic structure; (2) deep syntactic structure; and (3)…

A study investigated lexical decision-making among Dutch-English bilinguals in the auditory modality. Subjects, bilinguals at three proficiency levels (intermediate, high, and near-native) were presented with 40 cognate and 40 non-cognate word pairs, a similar number of English and Dutch distractors, and a similar number of nonsense words in each…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 27 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the vocalization of /L/ in Philadelphia; (2) a second grade program to isolate and apply knowledge of vowel sounds in word identification; (3) phoneme and…

A study investigated the processes used by bilinguals for organizing vocabulary by presenting subjects with bilingual word recognition tasks in two modalities (aural and visual) and using a repetition paradigm. Subjects were asked to decide whether a word presented to them was a nonsense word or a real word. Two separate experiments are described.…