This article proposes an integrated cognitive theory of reading and listening that draws on a maximalist account of comprehension and emphasizes the role of bottom-up and top-down processing. The theoretical framework draws on the findings of previous research and integrates them into a coherent and plausible narrative to explain and predict the…

This study investigated whether vocabulary delays in toddlers with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) can be explained by a cognitive style that prioritizes processing of detailed, local features of input over global contextual integration--as claimed by the weak central coherence (WCC) theory. Thirty toddlers with ASD and 30 younger,…

Speech processing requires sensitivity to long-term regularities of the native language yet demands listeners to flexibly adapt to perturbations that arise from talker idiosyncrasies such as nonnative accent. The present experiments investigate whether listeners exhibit "dimension-based statistical learning" of correlations between acoustic…

Misperception of nonwords created by adjacent letter transpositions (TL anagrams) indicates that word recognition is based on an orthographic matching process that is tolerant of minor positional errors in the letter sequence. We report five experiments that investigate the extent to which the misperception of TL anagrams is influenced by…

Provides an alternative explanation of the divergent findings appearing in the literature on conceptual tempo and reading acquisition. (HOD)