The visual system is tuned by its inputs. The behavior of reading offers a unique way to examine tuning for visual representations (letters) because readers have massive experience recognizing letters in a systematic context (reading). One aspect of reading is that letters are highly crowded within words, which severely limits their…

Soares, Lages, Oliveira, and Cabrera-Hernández (2019) recently showed that the mirror-letter interference effect observed for words containing reversal letters was reliable for words containing left-oriented mirror-letters as 'd', but not for words containing right-oriented mirror-letters as 'b', thus indicating that the directionality of the…

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…

This dissertation investigates the impact of cross-modal binding on word reading skills among English Language Learners (ELLs). Using Baddeley's updated working memory model, which includes the Episodic Buffer, this study examines how the ability to bind visual and phonological information in memory influences the reading development of ELL…

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…

This study tested the effect of constraining sentence context on word recognition time (RT) in the first and second language. Native (L1) and nonnative (L2) speakers of English performed self-paced reading and listening tasks to see whether a semantically-rich preceding context would lead to the activation of a probable upcoming word prior to…

Taken together, the Coherence Principle of Multimedia Learning Theory and the Integrated Systems Hypothesis propose that co-occurring and semantically congruent verbal and visual information should be integrated into one mental representation that enhances memory. The purpose of this paper was to examine how learning pseudowords with matching…

The role of syllables as a sublexical unit in visual word recognition and reading is well established in deep and shallow syllable-timed languages such as French and Spanish, respectively. However, its role in intermediate stress-timed languages remains unclear. This paper aims to overcome this gap by studying for the first time the role of…

The present study investigated the representation and processing of segmental and tonal information in visual Chinese word recognition in native and non-native Chinese readers. Two experiments using homophone judgement paradigm were conducted. When judging two Chinese characters (Experiment 1), both groups showed difficulties when the segmental…

Several studies in Spanish and other languages have shown that, in a lexical decision task, children are more likely to accept pseudowords with a known morphological structure as words as compared to non-morphological pseudowords. Morphology also facilitates visual word recognition of actual words in children with reading difficulties. In the…

It has been suggested that the preview benefit effect is actually a combination of preview benefit and preview costs. Marx et al. (2015) proposed that visually degrading the parafoveal preview reduces the costs associated with traditional parafoveal letter masks used in the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975), thus leading to a more neutral baseline.…

In this study, we examined the effects of emotional experience, a relatively new dimension of emotional knowledge that gauges the ease with which words evoke emotional experience, on abstract word processing in the Stroop task. In order to test the context-dependency of these effects, we accentuated the saliency of this dimension in Experiment 1A…

Although previous research has shown that letter position information for the first letter of a parafoveal word is encoded less flexibly than internal word beginning letters (Johnson, Perea & Rayner, 2007; White et al., 2008), it is not clear how positional encoding operates over the initial trigram in English. This experiment explored the…

The goal of the study was to examine the association between visual-attentional span and lexical decision in skilled adult readers. In the span tasks, an array of letters was presented briefly and recognition or production of a single cued letter (partial span) or production of all letters (whole span) was required. Independently of letter…

Readers continuously receive parafoveal information about the upcoming word in addition to the foveal information about the currently fixated word. Previous research (Inhoff, Radach, Starr, & Greenberg, 2000) showed that the presence of a parafoveal word that was similar to the foveal word facilitated processing of the foveal word. We used the…