Purpose: This study evaluated the extent to which partial spoken or written information facilitates sentence recognition under degraded unimodal and multimodal conditions. Method: Twenty young adults with typical hearing completed sentence recognition tasks in unimodal and multimodal conditions across 3 proportions of preservation. In the unimodal…

To investigate the neural bases of consonant and vowel processing, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read words and pseudowords in a lexical decision task. The stimuli were displayed in three different conditions: (i) simultaneous presentation of all letters (baseline condition); (ii) presentation of all letters,…

When addressing infants, many adults adopt a particular type of speech, known as infant-directed speech (IDS). IDS is characterized by exaggerated intonation, as well as reduced speech rate, shorter utterance duration, and grammatical simplification. It is commonly asserted that IDS serves in part to facilitate language learning. Although…

This article examined the effects of body-object interaction (BOI) on semantic processing. BOI measures perceptions of the ease with which a human body can physically interact with a word's referent. In Experiment 1, BOI effects were examined in 2 semantic categorization tasks (SCT) in which participants decided if words are easily imageable.…

Three experiments are reported regarding reaction time. Letter comparison time was found to increase when other irrelevant letters were present, regardless of whether or not the letters made up a word or a word-like configuration. Word comparison time was found to increase when distractors were similar to targets. (Author/RM)

A. Pollatsek, E. D. Reichle, and K. Rayner argue that the critical findings in A. W. Inhoff, B. M. Eiter, and R. Radach are in general agreement with core assumptions of sequential attention shift models if additional assumptions and facts are considered. The current authors critically discuss the hypothesized time line of processing and indicate…

An investigation of word-by-word time-course of spoken language understanding focused on word recognition and structural and interpretative processes. Results supported an online interactive language processing theory, in which lexical, structural, and interpretative knowledge sources communicate and interact during processing efficiently and…

Examines the performance of normal and disabled readers in recognizing whether orally presented letter strings represent real words. Finds that disabled readers have difficulty in making available the full range of semantic cues when processing stimuli in an acoustic form, supporting a verbal-processing deficit hypothesis of reading disability.…

Subjects named or categorized a picture preceded sometime earlier by itself or by its verbal label, as well as a word preceded by itself or a pictorial counterpart. Pictures clearly profited more when the task was naming, whereas words profited more when subjects performed a categorization task. (Author/GDC)

Two studies of toddlers and children with autism, mentally handicapped children, and normal toddlers examined whether autistic toddlers used Speaker's Direction of Gaze (SDG) strategy or less powerful Listener's Direction of Gaze (LDG) strategy to learn a word for a novel object. Results suggest autistic toddlers are insensitive to speaker's gaze…

To investigate decision level processes involved in bilingual word recognition tasks, Dutch-English participants had to name Dutch-English homographs in English. In a stimulus list containing items from both languages, interlingual homographs yielded longer naming latencies, more Dutch responses, and more other errors in both response languages if…

Reports on research that (1) suggests that phonetically ambiguous pairs (ice cream/I scream) have been used inaccurately to illustrate contextual effects in word segmentation, (2) supports unitary rather than exhaustive processing, and (3) supports the use of the concepts of word frequency and listener expectations instead of top-down, multiple…

Predictions were derived from the assumption that the vocabulary store underlying the auditory analysis of verbal stimuli is organized as an acoustic space rather than as a lexicon (tree) or collection. The relationship between frequency of occurrence in the language and frequency of occurrence as an error is low. (Author/SW)

Three experiments were conducted to investigate whether the results of previous research on rhymes detection were due to a rhyme production frequency bias (in favor of similar rhymes) in the materials used. The previous results had indicated that orthographically similar rhymes were detected more rapidly than dissimilar rhymes. In the three…

Age differences in recognition and recall of common nouns were studied using three groups of fifty students, with mean ages of 6.7, 11.4, and 16.9. Subjects were randomly placed in either an incidental or intentional learning condition. All subjects were questioned about the physical, phonemic, and semantic aspects of the same words, in the same…