Purpose: There is a long-standing debate about how written words are recognized. Central to this debate is the role of phonology. The objective of this study is to contribute to our collective understanding regarding the role of phonology in written word recognition. Method: A total of 30 monolingual adults were tested using a novel written word…

Visual word recognition is facilitated by the presence of "orthographic neighbors" that mismatch the target word by a single letter substitution. However, researchers typically do not consider "where" neighbors mismatch the target. In light of evidence that some letter positions are more informative than others, we investigate…

The present study investigated whether adult learners of second language (L2) can automatically activate emotional connotation during emotional word recognition as compared native (L1) users and whether L2 use plays a significant role in it. The automaticity of activation was measured through the emotional Stroop task. In this task, emotional…

In four experiments, we investigated the impact of letter case (lower case vs. UPPER CASE) on the processing of sequences of written words. Experiment 1 used the rapid parallel visual presentation (RPVP) paradigm with postcued identification of one word in a five-word sequence. The sequence could be grammatically correct (e.g., "the boy likes…

Successful word recognition requires that listeners attend to differences that are phonemic in the language while also remaining flexible to the variation introduced by different voices and accents. Previous work has demonstrated that American-English-learning 19-month-olds are able to balance these demands: although one-off one-feature…

Two masked priming experiments investigated the impact of prime lexicality (word vs. nonword) and the pseudo-morphological structure of prime stimuli (pseudosuffixed vs. nonsuffixed) on embedded word priming effects. In the related prime conditions, target words were embedded at the beginning of prime stimuli and were followed either by a…

We investigated the mechanisms underlying sandwich priming, a procedure in which a brief preprime target presentation precedes the conventional mask-prime-target sequence, used to study orthographic similarity. Lupker and Davis (2009) showed the sandwich paradigm enhances orthographic priming effects: With primes moderately related to targets,…

Prior behavioral experiments across a variety of tasks have typically shown that the go/no-go procedure produces not only shorter response times and/or fewer errors than the two-choice procedure, but also yields a higher sensitivity to experimental manipulations. To uncover the time course of information processing in the go/no-go versus the…

Dickinson and Szeligo ("Can J Exp Psychol" 62(4):211--222, 2008) found that processing time for simple visual stimuli was affected by the visual action participants had been instructed to perform on these stimuli (e.g., see, distinguish). It was concluded that these effects reflected the differences in the durations of these various…

This study examined how language proficiency and age of acquisition affect a bilingual language user's reliance on the dominant language during lexical access. Two bilingual groups performed a translation recognition task: Mandarin-English classroom bilinguals who acquired their dominant language (Mandarin) from birth and their non-dominant…

Theories of reading aloud are silent about the role of subphonemic/subsegmental representations in translating print to sound. However, there is empirical evidence suggesting that feature representations are activated in speech production and visual word recognition. In the present study, we sought to determine whether masked primes activate…

The main purpose of the current study is to explain the effect of an enrichment reading program on the cognitive processes and neural structures of children experiencing reading difficulties. The current study was carried out in line with a single-subject research method and the between-subjects multiple probe design belonging to this method. This…

The present research aimed to investigate whether, as previously observed with pictures, background auditory rhythm would also influence visual word recognition. In a lexical decision task, participants were presented with bisyllabic visual words, segmented into two successive groups of letters, while an irrelevant strongly metric auditory…

Performance of the Stroop task reflects two conflicts--informational (between the incongruent word and ink color) and task (between relevant color naming and irrelevant word reading). The task conflict is usually not visible, and is only seen when task control is damaged. Using the stop-signal paradigm, a few studies demonstrated longer…

The present study sheds light on the interplay between lexical and decision processes in the lexical decision task by exploring the effects of lexical decision difficulty on semantic priming effects. In 2 experiments, we increased lexical decision difficulty by either using transposed letter wordlike nonword distracters (e.g., JUGDE; Experiment 1)…