Visual Word Recognition

A growing body of psycholinguistic research suggests that visual and auditory word recognition involve morphological decomposition: Individual morphemes are extracted and lexically accessed when participants are presented with multi-morphemic stimuli. This view is supported by the Morpheme Interference Effect (MIE), where responses to pseudowords that contain real morphemes are slower and less accurate than responses to pseudowords that contain invented morphemes. The MIE was previously demonstrated primarily for visually presented stimuli. Here, we examine whether individuals' sensitivity to morphological structure generalizes across modalities. Participants performed a lexical decision task on visually and auditorily presented Hebrew stimuli, including pseudowords derived from real or invented roots. The results show robust MIEs in both modalities. We further show that visual MIE is consistently stronger than auditory MIE, both at the group level and at the individual level. Finally, the data show a significant correlation between visual and auditory MIEs at the individual level. These findings suggest that the MIE reflects a general sensitivity to morphological structure, which varies considerably across individuals, but is largely consistent across modalities within individuals. Thus, we propose that the MIE captures an important aspect of language processing, rather than a property specific to visual word recognition.

MEMOIRE - First year master in cognitive science, EMC LYON 2.
Sentence superiority effect has already been investigated with the rapid parallel visual presentation (RPVP) of four horizontally aligned words. In this study, a version with a semantic manipulation has been used. Four words sentences were presented during 200 ms, followed by a mask and a cue over the word to report. Sentences could be syntactically correct or ungrammatical (formed with the same words but scrambled), semantically congruent or incongruent (without any sense). The position of the target word was also manipulated. A better identification was found in the syntactically and semantically correct sentences condition, and a main effect for target’s position. These results suggest that a parallel word processing occurs early-on in order to generate a sentence-level representation. This representation seems to be earlier when the sentence is grammatically and semantically correct.

Effects of orthographic neighborhood in visual word recognition in Spanish were examined in 5 paradigms: progressive demasking, standard lexical decision, lexical decision with bloeldng of neighborhood density, naming, and semantic categorization. The results showed inhibitory effects of neighborhood frequency in the progressive-demasking task, in both lexieal-decision tasks, as well as for low-density words in the naming task, and for high-density words in the semantic-categorization task. Higher levels of neighborhood density produced an inhibitory trend in the progressive-demasking task, facilitation in lexieal decision (significant only when neighborhood density was blocked), and a robust facilitation effect in naming (only for words with higher frequency neighbors). A global analysis across tasks and one simulation study helped outline some of the underlying task-specific and task-independent mechanisms.

Phonology is a lower-level structural aspect of language involving the sounds of a language and their organization in that language. Numerous behavioral studies utilizing priming, which refers to an increased sensitivity to a stimulus following prior experience with that or a related stimulus, have provided evidence for the role of phonology in visual word recognition. However, most language studies utilizing priming in conjunction with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have focused on lexical-semantic aspects of language processing. The aim of the present study was to investigate the neurobiological substrates of the automatic, implicit stages of phonological processing. While undergoing fMRI, eighteen individuals performed a lexical decision task (LDT) on prime-target pairs including word-word homophone and pseudowordword pseudohomophone pairs with a prime presentation below perceptual threshold. Whole-brain analyses revealed several cortical regions exhibiting hemodynamic response suppression due to phonological priming including bilateral superior temporal gyri (STG), middle temporal gyri (MTG), and angular gyri (AG) with additional region of interest (ROI) analyses revealing response suppression in left lateralized supramarginal gyrus (SMG). Homophone and pseudohomophone priming also resulted in different patterns of hemodynamic responses relative to one another. These results suggest that phonological processing plays a key role in visual word recognition. Furthermore, enhanced hemodynamic responses for unrelated stimuli relative to primed stimuli were observed in midline cortical regions corresponding to the default-mode network (DMN) suggesting that DMN activity can be modulated by task requirements within the context of an implicit task.

The activation of the phonological code plays a central role in visual word recognition. However, it is still unclear how this activation is integrated within this mainly bottom-up process. In the present masked priming study we combined Greek and Spanish, two languages with common phonemes and partially overlapping graphemes to investigate this issue. Greek-Spanish bilinguals performed lexical decisions on Greek and Spanish targets, briefly preceded by either phonologically related or orthographically and phonologically related prime words of the non-target language. Results revealed significant bi-directional cross-script masked phonological priming effects which disappeared under the influence of nearly overlapping orthographic representations. This pattern of effects suggests that there is fast and automatic language non-selective activation of the phonological code during the initial stages of visual word recognition but that this is clearly dependent on the orthographic properties of the input stimulus. The implications of our findings are discussed within the framework of current models of monolingual and bilingual visual word recognition.

Abstract Over the last decade, there has been increasing evidence for syllabic processing during visual word recognition. If syllabic effects would prove to be independent from orthographic redundancy, this would seriously challenge the ability of current computational models to account for the processing of polysyllabic words. Three experiments are presented to disentangle effects of the frequency of syllabic units and orthographic segments in lexical decision. In Experiment 1 we obtained an inhibitory syllable-frequency effect that was unaffected by the presence or absence of a "bigram trough" at the syllable boundary. In Experiments 2 and 3 an inhibitory effect of initial syllable-frequency but a facilitative effect of initial bigram-frequency emerged when manipulating one of the two measures and controlling for the other in Spanish words starting with CV-syllables. We conclude that effects of syllable-frequency and letter cluster frequency are independent and arise at different processing levels of visual word recognition. Results are discussed within the framework of an interactive activation model of visual word recognition.

Objective: We report three experiments evaluating the proposal that highlighting sec- tions of drug names using uppercase (“tall man”) lettering and/or color may reduce the confusability of similar drug names. Background: Medication errors commonly involve drug names that look or sound alike. One potential method of reducing these errors is to highlight sections of names on labels in order to emphasize the differences between similar products. Method: In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were timed as they decided whether similar name pairs were the same name or two different names. Experiment 3 was a recognition memory task. Results: Results from Experiments 1 and 2 showed that highlighting sections of words using tall man lettering can make similar names easier to distinguish if participants are aware that this is the purpose of the intervention. Results from Experiment 3 suggested that tall man lettering and/or color does not make names less confusable in memory but that tall man letters may increase attention. Conclusion: These findings offer some support for the use of tall man letters in order to reduce errors caused by confusion between drug products with look-alike names. Application: The use of tall man letters could be applied in a vari- ety of visual presentations of drug names – for example, by manufacturers on packag- ing, labeling, and computer software, and in pharmacies on shelf labels. Additionally, this paper demonstrates two meaningful behavioral measures that can be used during product design to objectively assess confusability of packaging and labeling.

Visual errors in the perception of written drug names can reflect orthographic similarity amongst certain names. Drug names are typically printed in lowercase text. ‘Tall Man’ lettering, the capitalisation of the portions that differ amongst orthographically similar drug names, is employed in the field of medication labelling and prescribing to reduce medication errors by highlighting the area most likely to prevent confusion. The influence of textual format on visual drug name perception was tested amongst healthcare professionals (n = 133) using the Reicher-Wheeler task. Relative to lowercase text, Tall Man lettering improved accuracy in drug name perception. However, an equivalent improvement in accuracy was obtained using entirely uppercase text. Thus, character size may be a key determinant of perceptual accuracy for Tall Man lettering. Specific considerations for the manner in which Tall Man lettering might be best formatted and implemented in practice to reduce medication errors are discussed.

There is at present no clear consensus as to the nature of the relations between oral vocabulary and specific literacy skills. The present study distinguished between vocabulary breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge to better explain the role of oral vocabulary in various reading skills. A sample of 60 typically developing Grade 4 students was assessed on measures of receptive and expressive vocabulary breadth, depth of vocabulary knowledge, decoding, visual word recognition, and reading comprehension. Concurrent analyses revealed that each distinct reading skill was related to the vocabulary measures in a unique manner. Receptive vocabulary breadth was the only oral vocabulary variable that predicted decoding performance after controlling for age and nonverbal intelligence. In contrast, expressive vocabulary breadth predicted visual word recognition, whereas depth of vocabulary knowledge predicted reading comprehension. The results are discussed in terms of interrelations between phonological and semantic factors in the acquisition of distinct reading skills.

ORBWLL Version 11 consists of 9,300 bibliographic entries based on consulting and processing 3,750 source bibliographies. An online version (http://faculty.tama.ac.jp/joyce/awll/orbwll/index.html) also includes Cited by information for many entries, based on 67,238 citations among the source bibliographies.

Brain imaging studies reliably localize a region of visual cortex that is especially responsive to visual words. This brain specialization is essential to rapid reading ability because it enhances perception of words by becoming specifically tuned to recurring properties of a writing system. The origin of this specialization poses a challenge for evolutionary accounts involving innate mechanisms for functional brain organization. We propose an alternative account, based on studies of other forms of visual expertise (i.e. bird and car experts) that lead to functional reorganization. We argue that the interplay between the unique demands of word reading and the structural constraints of the visual system lead to the emergence of the Visual Word Form Area.

This chapter briefly describes the nature of the Spanish language as a linguistic type and discusses the difficulties
that readers face concerning the way phonologic, morphologic, and orthographic units are aligned
and recognized in reading. Particular attention is paid to the syllable-based decomposition of Spanish
words. Contrary to most cross-linguistic studies that underestimate the complexity of Spanish orthography
on ignoring the role of suprasegmental units in reading, evidence is reviewed that shows that actual
performance depends on the materials readers are actually given. Regardless, observations of low performance
in reading-comprehension tests, popular assessment scales, and studies that showhigh performance
for Spanish readers keep using nonrepresentative reading material and lexical candidates for which no
conflicting word-recognition processes emerge. Thus old prejudices about the shallow nature of Spanish
orthography are confirmed in most studies. The role of bottom-up and top-down processes in lexical selection
is discussed to account for theway that competing lexical entries become active in multiword displays

Developmental dyslexia was investigated within a well-understood and fully specified computational model of reading aloud: the dual route cascaded model (DRC [Coltheart, M., Rastle, K., Perry, C., Langdon, R., & Ziegler, J.C. (2001). DRC: A dual route cascaded model of visual word recognition and reading aloud. Psychological Review, 108,). Four tasks were designed to assess each representational level of the DRC: letter level, orthographic lexicon, phonological lexicon, and phoneme system. The data showed no single cause of dyslexia, but rather a complex pattern of phonological, phonemic, and letter processing deficits. Importantly, most dyslexics had deficits in more than one domain. Subtyping analyses also suggested that both the phonological and surface dyslexics almost always had more than a single underlying deficit. To simulate the reading performance for each individual with the DRC, we added 0010-0277/$ -see front matter Ó

The visual word recognition literature has been dominated by the study of monosyllabic words in factorial experiments, computational models, and megastudies. However, it is not yet clear whether the behavioral effects reported for monosyllabic words generalize reliably to multisyllabic words. Hierarchical regression techniques were used to examine the effects of standard variables (phonological onsets, stress pattern, length, orthographic N, phonological N, word frequency) and additional variables (number of syllables, feedforward and feedback phonological consistency, novel orthographic and phonological similarity measures, semantics) on the pronunciation and lexical decision latencies of 6115 monomorphemic multisyllabic words. These predictors accounted for 61.2% and 61.6% of the variance in pronunciation and lexical decision latencies, respectively, higher than the estimates reported by previous monosyllabic studies. The findings we report represent a well-specified set of benchmark phenomena for constraining nascent multisyllabic models of English word recognition.

The progressive technology makes tremendous changes on human interactivities. Those rapidly changing media also create various ways for users to build social networks. Those networking activities have become parts of our daily lives no matter when and where you are, when and where you do. The Visual Information Design Lab curated the IIID-Taipei booth event at 2011 IDA Congress (International Design Alliance). Visitors voluntarily participated in "leave-your-mark" activity. They draw, doodled, or wrote on a card which prepared by us. They put up the cards onto the wall and made a great interaction with the space, with the wall, with other cards, with other people, or even with the self. This project aims to extend this connection and interaction, the efforts include the digitalization and the management of visual information, searching engine building, and visual strategy development. Taking upon the success from the real world interactivity, we are trying to extend the memories and experiences through the web by various searching methods including keywords and email accounts. Those connections therefore switched the paradigm of how human interact with each other from point to mesh, from linear to non-linear.

The Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) model is a popular approach for visual recognition. Used successfully in many different tasks, simplicity and good performance are the main reasons for its popularity. The central aspect of this model, the visual dictionary, is used to build mid-level representations based on low level image descriptors. Classifiers are then trained using these mid-level representations to perform categorization. While most works based on BoVW models have been focused on learning a suitable dictionary or on proposing a suitable pooling strategy, little effort has been devoted to explore and improve the coupling between the dictionary and the top-level classifiers, in order to generate more discriminative models. This problem can be highly complex due to the large dictionary size usually needed by these methods. Also, most BoVW based systems usually perform multiclass categorization using a one-vs-all strategy, ignoring relevant correlations among classes. To tackle the previous issues, we propose a novel approach that jointly learns dictionary words and a proper top-level multiclass classifier. We use a max-margin learning framework to minimize a regularized energy formulation, allowing us to propagate labeled information to guide the commonly unsupervised dictionary learning process. As a result we produce a dictionary that is more compact and discriminative. We test our method on several popular datasets, where we demonstrate that our joint optimization strategy induces a word sharing behavior among the target classes, being able to achieve state-of-the-art performance using far less visual words than previous approaches.

In one lexical decision and three naming experiments, we established the effect of visually separating two letters that have to be considered jointly for pronunciation. Segmentation effects were studied for digraphic vowels and for ambiguous onset-letter (C) whose pronunciation is determined by the following vowel. Separating the two letters of a digraphic vowel (e.g., BO//EK) impaired reading in all experiments. Separating the onset C from the letter that resolves its ambiguity (e.g., C//ENT) did not impair reading more than separating an unambiguous onset-letter from the following vowel (e.g., T//ENT). However, there was a general processing cost for items with an ambiguous onset in terms of speed and accuracy. The conclusion is that local phonological ambiguity is resolved in two different stages: One that is sensitive to visual presentation and one that is not.

Two primed naming experiments tested the orthographic depth hypothesis in skilled biliterate readers of Hindi and Urdu. These languages are very similar on the spoken level but differ greatly in script; Hindi is a highly transparent script, whereas Urdu is more opaque. It was accordingly hypothesized that formbased priming would be greater for Hindi than Urdu, reflecting greater reliance on a phonological assembly route in the more transparent Hindi script. Proficient Hindi/ Urdu biliterate readers were presented with primes either in Hindi or Urdu script (Exp. 1), or in Roman transcription (Exp. 2), while targets were always in blocks of Hindi or Urdu. Across both experiments, form-based priming was observed only in Hindi. Additionally, target words were named significantly faster and better in Hindi than in Urdu. The results are taken as support for the hypothesis of differential reliance on phonological assembly as a function of script transparency. Further, the greater graphemic complexity of Urdu script relative to Hindi appears to have contributed to slower and less accurate overall single word reading for Urdu than Hindi, despite the fact that Urdu was the first learned script.

In this study, event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to trace the temporal dynamics of phonological consistency and phonetic combinability in the reading of Chinese phonograms. The data showed a significant consistency-by-combinability interaction at N170. High phonetic combinability characters elicited greater negativity at N170 than did low phonetic combinability characters, and the combinability effect was only found in the reading of high consistency characters. The results support the phonological mapping hypothesis of the reading-related N170 effect and suggest that the earlier stages of visual word recognition are shaped by the mapping of orthography to phonology even in Chinese. Moreover, our data revealed both consistency and combinability effects at P200 and N400, accounted for by the two-stage framework for visual word recognition. That is, characters with high combinability or high consistency facilitated the earlier stages of orthographic or phonological processing which were due to increased activation at the perceptual level; consequently, less positive P200 was demonstrated. In the later stages, high combinability or high consistency characters were associated with a larger semantic neighborhood, which increased semantic competition and exaggerated the N400 effect. These data support the assumption of radical-based inputs proposed by the lexical constituent model. However, the phonetic consistency effects found at N170 and P200 cannot be reconciled with the current framework of the lexical constituent model. A possible revision will be discussed.

The position the eye initially fixates in a written word influences the ease with which this word is recognized. Prior research has shown that the function relating ease of word recognition and initial fixation position in the word is not symmetric. Word recognition is generally superior when the initial fixation is left rather than right of the center of the word. This asymmetry in the function relating initial fixation position to word identifiability could be due to (a) hemispheric specialization, (b) reading habits, or (c) variations in lexical constraint. The present experiments tested these alternative explanations by comparing the effects of initial fixation position in prefixed and suffixed words in French and Arabic. The results show that, contrary to both the hemispheric specialization and reading habit hypotheses, the average initial fixation curves for Arabic are asymmetric neither to the left nor to the right but depend on the morphological structure of the stimuli, thus lending support to the lexical constraint hypothesis.

The issue of word recognition efficiency in secondary school students in Japan and Korea is considered. The relative distance between language writing systems can exert a strong influence on reading in second languages. Since the Japanese writing style is further from English than Korean, it is shown, through the use of a quick-and-easy test of word recognition, that Koreans have greater ease in learning to read English high-frequency words and score significantly higher on this measure by the end of secondary schooling. Low scores on this measure can be considered as very likely linked to weaker comprehension ability in English. In addition to this, the paper suggests that the emphasis on word recognition is too weak in secondary education, especially in Japan. The implications of this situation for English education in East Asia are considered.

In Indo-European languages, letter position coding is particularly noisy in middle positions (e.g., judge are jugde look very similar), but not in the initial letter position (e.g., judge vs. ujdge). Here we focus on a language (Thai) which, potentially, may be more flexible with respect to letter position coding than Indo-European languages: i) Thai is an alphabetic language which is written without spaces between words (i.e., there is a degree of ambiguity in relation to which word a given letter belongs to) and ii) some of the vowels are misaligned (e.g., แแแ /:bn/ is pronounced as /b:n/), whereas others are not (e.g. แแแ /a:p/ is pronounced as /a:p/). We conducted a masked priming lexical decision experiment with 3-4 letter Thai words (with vs. without an initial misaligned vowel) in which the prime was: i) identical to the target, ii) a nonword generated by transposing the two initial letters of the target, or iii) a replacement-letter control nonword. Results showed a significant masked transposed-letter priming effect in the initial letter positions, which was similar in size for words with and without an initial misaligned vowel. These findings reflect that: i) letter position coding in Thai is very flexible, ii) the nature of the obtained priming effects is orthographic rather than phonological.

Six experiments addressed the role of phonological information in visual word recognition using a semantic-decision task. Experiment 1 replicated finding that Ss make more false-positive errors on homophone foils than on spelling controls, indicating phonological activation of meaning. Experiment 2 showed that only lower frequency words yield this effect when broader categories are used. In Experiments 3 and 4, the homophony effect for lower frequency words remained, even though the stimuli included a large proportion of homophones, suggesting that activation of phonological information cannot be strategically inhibited. Experiments 5 and 6 examined effects of homophony on targets that were correct category exemplars and yielded similar results. These studies indicate that in skilled readers, phonological information contributes to the activation of word meaning only for low-frequency words.

CITATION Lagrou, E., Hartsuiker, RJ, & Duyck, W. (2011, April 18). Knowledge of a Second Language Influences Auditory Word Recognition in the Native Language. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/ ...

Word-recognition tests for second language learners have become more common in recent years with increased awareness of their importance in lexical processing. However, the very short reaction times involved mean the associated technology is complicated to handle and set up in school-based testing situations. Our solution to this problem is a quick-and-easy test called „Q_Lex‟. The most innovative feature is that the stimuli are masked in nonsense strings; e.g. <pajlchanceacdut>. This approach slows down recognition time to a degree that PCs can reliably measure (1 or 2 seconds). Native speakers have little trouble identifying the hidden words and so their latencies can be used as a baseline to create norms for each item. Learners score points if they respond within these norms. In this way, Q_Lex produces a score rather than a response time result. The target words are all high-frequency and a large number (typically 50) can be tested in a few minutes.
In this thesis, the approach to word recognition testing described above is first set within the literature on second-language word recognition. 9 papers are reviewed. Two areas are addressed: the precise measurement of vocabulary recognition speed and the measurement of lexical accessibility. Beyond careful experimental design, it is useful to try to understand what makes some tests better than others. Simple design, rapid completion and adequate vocabulary coverage are very important factors if the aim is to reflect the state of development of the second language lexicon rather than test individual words.
In the next part, I will go through a cycle of testing the reliability and validity of Q_Lex from the prototype version 1.1 to version 3.01. The work focuses on areas including: the consistency of scores between two tests with varying intervals; the improvement of items and the test interface, specifically the effect of the mask on finding the hidden word; the comparison of similar item sets for evidence of parallel forms reliability; issues connected with the interpretation of test-takers‟ performance, especially with regard to the question of variability in reaction time. Gradually I will build up a picture of a test gaining in construct validity and reliability whilst taking heed of the work of experts on testing and theorists in second language acquisition theory. One weakness of Q_Lex is the recurrent evidence of test-taking strategies to account for some of the scores of many individuals. For this reason, in Chapter 9, the thesis moves to a more qualitative perspective to investigate exactly what happens as people take the test. The findings here provide additional useful pointers for further development of the format in future work.
In the discussion chapter, the threads are brought together. An important issue concerns the “co-efficient of variation” index for cognitive fluency which cannot be calculated from standard Q_Lex data. The reasons for this are elucidated, and an alternative is suggested.

A parallel distributed processing model of visual word recognition and pronunciation is described. The model consists of sets of orthographic and phonologlc~ units and an interlevel of hidden units. Weights on connections between units were modified during a training phase using the back-propagation learning algorithm. The model simulates many aspects of human performance, including (a) differences bet~n~.'n words in terms of processing difficulty, (b) pronunciation of novel items, (c) differences between readers in terms of word recognition skill, (d) transitions from beginning to skilled reading, and (e) differences in performance on lexieal decision and naming tasks. The model's behavior early in the learning phase corresponds to that of children acquiring word recognition skills. Training with a smaller number of hidden units produces output characteristic of many dyslexic readers. Naming is simulated without pronunciation rules, and lexical decisions are simulated without accessing word-level representations. The performance of the model is largely determined by three factors: the nature of the input, a significant fragment of written English; the learning rule, which encodes the implicit structure of the orthography in the weights on connections; and the architecture of the system, which influences the scope of what can be learned.

This study investigated whether semantic information presented along with novel printed nonwords facilitates orthographic learning and examined predictors of individual differences in this important literacy skill. A sample of 35 fourth graders was tested on a variety of language and literacy tests, and participants were then exposed to 10 target nonwords, 5 of which were presented with semantic information. Children were tested 1 and 4 days later on their ability to correctly recognize and spell the target nonwords. Results revealed a significant main effect on the recognition task, where items presented with semantic information were identified correctly more often than were words presented in isolation. No significant effect of training condition was found for the spelling posttests. Furthermore, multiple regression analyses revealed that both phonological and semantic factors were significant predictors of orthographic learning. The findings support the view that orthographic learning, as measured through visual recognition, involves the integration of phonological, orthographic, and semantic representations.

How is reading, a cultural invention, coded by neural populations in the human brain? The neural code for written words must be abstract, because we can recognize words regardless of their location, font and size. Yet it must also be exquisitely sensitive to letter identity and letter order. Most existing coding schemes are insufficiently invariant or incompatible with the constraints of the visual system. We propose a tentative neuronal model according to which part of the occipitotemporal 'what' pathway is tuned to writing and forms a hierarchy of local combination detectors sensitive to increasingly larger fragments of words. Our proposal can explain why the detection of 'open bigrams' (ordered pairs of letters) constitutes an important stage in visual word recognition.

The present research investigated the relationship between Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) performance, letter-string reading measures of sight vocabulary (SV) and phonetic decoding (PD), and lexical decision. Criterion-based naming rates were obtained from three types of RAN tasks: digits, letters, and letter sounds. Latency measures were obtained from the naming of regular words, exception words, nonwords and pseudohomophones; as well as button press and verbal lexical decision tasks. Regression analyses supported the hypotheses that RAN-Letters latency reflects SV processing in that its variance is uniquely accounted for by exception word naming latency and button press lexical decision latency, and that RAN-Letter Sounds latency best reflects PD processing in that its variance is uniquely accounted for by pseudohomophone and nonword naming latency. Findings are discussed in light of what the RAN tasks are measuring, implications involving visual word recognition models of reading, and the utility of the new RAN-Letter Sounds task with respect to diagnostic and remediation applications.

In current study we examine how letter permutation affects in visual recognition of words for two orthographically dissimilar languages, Urdu and German. We present the hypothesis that recognition or reading of permuted and non-permuted words are two distinct mental level processes, and that people use different strategies in handling permuted words as compared to normal words. A comparison between reading

Miwa, K., G. Libben, T. Dijkstra, and R. H. Baayen
This lexical decision study with eye tracking of Japanese two-kanji-character words investigated the order in which a whole two-character word and its morphographic constituents are activated in the course of lexical access, the relative contributions of the left and the right characters in lexical decision, the depth to which semantic radicals are processed, and how nonlinguistic factors affect lexical processes. Mixed-effects regression analyses of response times and subgaze durations (i.e., first-pass fixation time spent on each of the two characters) revealed joint contributions of morphographic units at all levels of the linguistic structure with the magnitude and the direction of the lexical effects modulated by readers' locus of attention in a left-to-right preferred processing path. During the early time frame, character effects were larger in magnitude and more robust than radical and whole-word effects, regardless of the font size and the type of nonwords. Extending previous radical-based and character-based models, we propose a task/decision-sensitive character-driven processing model with a level-skipping assumption: Connections from the feature level bypass the lower radical level and link up directly to the higher character level.

This article evaluates 2 competing models that address the decision-making processes mediating word recognition and lexical decision performance: a hybrid 2-stage model of lexical decision performance and a random-walk model. In 2 experiments, nonword type and word frequency were manipulated across 2 contrasts (pseudohomophone-legal nonword and legal-illegal nonword). When nonwords became more wordlike (i.e., BRNTA vs. BRANT vs. BRANE), response latencies to nonwords were slowed and the word frequency effect increased. More important, distributional analyses revealed that the Nonword Type ϫ Word Frequency interaction was modulated by different components of the response time distribution, depending on the specific nonword contrast. A single-process random-walk model was able to account for this particular set of findings more successfully than the hybrid 2-stage model.

The authors compared sublexical and supralexical approaches to morphological processing with unam-biguous and ambiguous inflected words and words with ambiguous stems in 3 masked and unmasked priming experiments in Finnish. Experiment 1 showed equal facilitation for all prime types with a short 60-ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) but significant facilitation for unambiguous words only with a long 300-ms SOA. Experiment 2 showed that all potential readings of ambiguous inflections were activated under a short SOA. Whereas the prime–target form overlap did not affect the results under a short SOA, it significantly modulated the results with a long SOA. Experiment 3 confirmed that the results from masked priming were modulated by the morphological structure of the words but not by the prime–target form overlap alone. The results support approaches in which early prelexical morphological processing is driven by morph-based segmentation and form is used to cue selection between 2 candidates only during later processing.

Models of morphological processing make different predictions about whether morphologically complex written words are initially decomposed and recognized on the basis of their morphemic subunits or whether they can directly be accessed as whole words and at what point semantics begin to influence morphological processing. In this study, we used unprimed and masked primed lexical decision to compare truly suffixed (darkest) and pseudosuffixed words (glossary) with within-boundary (drakest/golssary) to across-boundary (darekst/glosasry) letter transpositions. Significant transposed-letter similarity effects were found independently of the morphological position of the letter transposition, demonstrating that, in English, morphologically complex whole-word representations can be directly accessed at initial word processing stages. In a third masked primed lexical decision experiment, the same materials were used in the context of stem target priming, and it was found that truly suffixed primes facilitate the recognition of their stem-target (darkest-DARK) to the same extent as pseudosuffixed primes (glossary-GLOSS), which is consistent with theories of early morpho-orthographic decomposition. Taken together, our findings provide evidence for both whole-word access and morphological decomposition at initial stages of visual word recognition and are discussed in the context of a hybrid account.

Background. Studies focusing on reading errors can help to understand how children learn to read and to structure key components of reading instruction. However, no prior studies have examined which letters might be a greater source of difficulty for beginning readers in Spanish.

This work would not have been possible without the help of many people. First and foremost, I wish to thank my advisor, Prof. Michal Ben-Shachar. Michal has taught me a lot on how to do good science and how to present my research in a clear and organized manner. The high standards she set for me and the invaluable comments she provided me along the way helped me become a better scientist. I would like to thank the members of my PhD committee, Prof. Zohar Eviatar and Dr. Elana Zion Golumbic, for their comments on my research proposal.

The effects of briefly presented, masked, and orthographically and/or phonologically related nonword primes on the recognition of subsequently presented target words were investigated in different experimental tasks. Robust effects of orthographic and phonological priming were observed in both the lexical decision and the perceptual identification tasks, with no such effects appearing in the word naming task, except for orthographic priming effects at the shortest prime exposures. Further investigation of this marked dissociation across experimental tasks showed that word naming is particularly sensitive to shared onsets in the masked priming paradigm and that robust rhyme priming does occur when primes and targets have different onsets. The lexical decision task, on the other hand, showed priming effects independently of whether prime and targets shared onsets. These results are discussed within the framework of a bimodal interactive activation model of visual word recognition and naming. ᭧