The Korean alphabetic script ("Hangul") depicts alphabetic characters in syllable blocks. The present experiments investigate whether, as a consequence of this printing convention, the syllable has a special processing status in naming printed Korean stimuli, independent of lexical and subsyllabic sources of information. In the first experiment it…

A number of studies reported that developmental dyslexics are impaired in speech perception, especially for speech signals consisting of rapid auditory transitions. These studies mostly made use of a categorical-perception task with synthetic-speech samples. In this study, we show that deficits in the perception of synthetic speech do not…

In a series of experiments, the effect of white noise distortion and talker variation on lexical access in normal and Broca's aphasic participants was examined using an auditory lexical decision paradigm. Masking the prime stimulus in white noise resulted in reduced semantic priming for both groups, indicating that lexical access is degraded by…

Reading requires the orchestration of visual, attentional, language-related, and oculomotor processing constraints. This study replicates previous effects of frequency, predictability, and length of fixated words on fixation durations in natural reading and demonstrates new effects of these variables related to 144 sentences. Such evidence for…

Four experiments examined effects of lexical stress on lexical access for recently learned words. Participants learned artificial lexicons (48 words) containing phonologically similar items and were tested on their knowledge in a 4-alternative forced-choice (4AFC) referent-selection task. Lexical stress differences did not reduce confusions…

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…

In textbooks, foreign (second) language reading proficiency is often evaluated through comprehension questions. In case, authentic texts are used as reading material, such questions should be prepared by teachers. However, preparing appropriate questions may be a very demanding task for teachers. This paper introduces a method for automatically…

Jaw movement patterns were examined longitudinally in a 3-year-old male with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) and compared with a typically developing control group. The child with CAS was followed for 8 months, until he began accurately and consistently producing the bilabial phonemes /p/, /b/, and /m/. A movement tracking system was used to…

Considering the difficulties in understanding the global meaning of texts, this paper intends to give some suggestions on how to help students reach a deeper understanding of texts in intensive reading classroom within the framework of schema theory. The purpose of this paper is expressed in three ways. The first is to give a brief overview of…