Four lexical decision experiments are reported that use the masked priming paradigm to study the role of letter position information in orthographic processing. In Experiments 1 and 2, superset primes, formed by repetition of 1 or 2 letters of the target (e.g., jusstice-JUSTICE) or by insertion of 1 or 2 unrelated letters (e.g., juastice-JUSTICE),…

In a recent study of conceptual combination, Estes (2003) presented evidence for the priming of relational information in the absence of shared constituents between the prime and target (e.g., "pancake spatula" was interpreted more quickly following "bacon tongs" than following "city riots"). He argued that these data support the view that…

This article investigates the potential of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) for exploring students' achievements in writing, thus moving beyond "deficit models" of grammar in school English. It considers the semantic features of successful interpretations of examination narratives, using what I call the "symbolic reading".…

Each year the Cognitive Science Society honors David Rumelhart by awarding the Rumelhart Prize to an outstanding cognitive scientist whose research makes a significant contribution to the formal analysis of human cognition. Formal models of language, including those of Rumelhart and his associates, are well known to psycholinguists in the…

How do we produce the past tenses of verbs? For the last 20 years this question has been the focal domain for conflicting theories of language, knowledge representation, and cognitive processing. On one side of the debate have been similarity-based or single-route approaches that propose that all past tenses are formed simply through phonological…

Six experiments apply the masked priming paradigm to investigate how letter position information is computed during printed word perception. Primes formed by a subset of the target's letters facilitated target recognition as long as the relative position of letters was respected across prime and target (e.g., "arict" vs. "acirt" as primes for the…

It has been commonly agreed that developmental dyslexia in different languages has a common biological origin: a dysfunction of left posterior temporal brain regions dealing with phonological processes. Siok, Perfetti, Jin, and Tan (2004, "Nature," 431, 71-76) challenge this biological unity theory of dyslexia: Chinese dyslexics show no deficits…

This study examined the role of phonological memory in second language (L2) grammar learning in a group of native French-speaking children undergoing a 5-month intensive English program. Phonological memory (as referenced by Arabic [ANWR] and English [ENWR] nonword repetition tasks), L2 vocabulary (receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge),…

In reading research, studies on good and poor reader characteristics abound. However, these findings remain largely scattered in applied linguistics and cognitive and educational psychology. This paper attempts to synthesize current theory and research on the topic in the past 20 years along 3 dimensions: language knowledge and processing ability,…

Cognitive mechanisms underlying repetition priming in picture naming were decomposed in several experiments. Sets of encoding manipulations meant to selectively prime or reduce priming in object identification or word production components of picture naming were combined factorially to dissociate processes underlying priming in picture naming.…

This study investigates the impact of a five-week intermediate Spanish course on the listening comprehension ability of 48 participants in short-term study abroad programs, and compares these groups with 92 peers enrolled in a similar course on the home campus. While both on-campus and study abroad groups experienced similar gains in listening…

There is considerable evidence from psycholinguistics that first language listeners handle function words differently from content words. This makes intuitive sense because content words require the listener to access a lexical meaning representation whereas function words do not. A separate channel of processing for functors would enable them to…

The current study investigates the phonemic awareness and nonword processing of English as a foreign language students from Hong Kong and Mainland China, with reference to factors considered the main facilitators of phonemic awareness: written language experience, spoken language experience, and metalinguistic training. The Mainland Chinese…

The 11th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2018) is held under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society at the Templeton Landing in Buffalo, New York. This year's EDM conference was highly competitive, with 145 long and short paper submissions. Of these, 23 were accepted as full papers and 37…

Automated essay grading or scoring systems are no more a myth, but they are a reality. As of today, the human written (not hand written) essays are corrected not only by examiners/teachers but also by machines. The TOEFL exam is one of the best examples of this application. The students' essays are evaluated both by human and web based automated…