Word identification in reading proceeds from spelling to sound to meaning

Reading Braille by Touch Recruits Posterior Parietal Cortex

Blind readers use a tactile reading system consisting of raised dot arrays: braille/⠃⠗⠇. How do human brains implement reading by touch? The current study looked for signatures of reading-specific orthographic processes in braille, separate from low-level somatosensory responses and semantic processes. Of specific interest were responses in posterior parietal cortices (PPCs), because of their role in high-level tactile perception. Congenitally blind, proficient braille readers read real words and pseudowords by touch while undergoing fMRI. We leveraged the system of contractions in English braille, where one braille cell can represent multiple English print letters (e.g., "ing" ⠬, "one" ⠐⠕), making it possible to separate physical and orthographic word length. All words in the study consisted of four braille cells, but their corresponding Roman letter spellings varied from four to seven letters (e.g., "con-c-er-t" ⠒⠉⠻⠞. contracted: four cells; uncontracted: seven letters). We found that the bilateral supramarginal gyrus in the PPC increased its activity as the uncontracted word length increased. By contrast, in the hand region of primary somatosensory cortex (S1), activity increased as a function of a low-level somatosensory feature: dot-number per word. The PPC also showed greater response to pseudowords than real words and distinguished between real and pseudowords in multivariate-pattern analysis. Parieto-occipital, early visual and ventral occipito-temporal, as well as prefrontal cortices also showed sensitivity to the real-versus-pseudoword distinction. We conclude that PPC is involved in orthographic processing for braille, that is, braille character and word recognition, possibly because of braille's tactile modality.

Types of acquired dyslexia in Spanish-speaking patients with aphasia

The different types of acquired dyslexia described by cognitive neuropsychology have been observed in single-case and case series studies in different languages. However, no multipatient study of Spanish-speaking individuals has been reported that uses the same criteria and tasks to identify each participant's acquired dyslexia pattern. In this study, we analyzed participants' performance in three tasks (oral reading of words and nonwords, visual lexical decision with pseudohomophones, and written homophone comprehension) among 16 Spanish-speaking patients with aphasia. We identified 9 patients with acquired phonological dyslexia, 3 with acquired surface dyslexia, and 4 with acquired mixed dyslexia. The results of this research provide more information about the relative frequency of each type of acquired dyslexia in Spanish, which could be used to help design more appropriate treatments for rehabilitation. Identifying which processes have been impaired and which have been preserved will allow professionals to plan more specific interventions.

The role of orthographic cues to stress in Italian visual word recognition

In this study, stress diacritics were used to investigate the processing of stress information in lexical decision. We ran two experiments in Italian, a language in which stress position is not predictable by rule and only final stress-that is, the less common pattern-is orthographically marked with a diacritic. In Experiment 1, a lexical decision task, two factors were manipulated: the stress pattern of words-antepenultimate (nondominant) and penultimate (dominant)-and the presence/absence of the diacritics, signalling the stress position. Participants were faster to categorise stimuli as words when they bear dominant than nondominant stress. However, the advantage disappeared when the diacritic was used. In Experiment 2, a same-different verification task was used in which participants had to decide if a referent word and a target were same (carota-CAROTA, /ka'rɔta/; tavolo-TAVOLO, /'tavolo/) or different. We compared two conditions requiring a "different" response, in which referent and target with dominant and nondominant stress were congruent (caròta-CAROTA; tàvolo-TAVOLO) or incongruent (càrota-CAROTA; tavòlo-TAVOLO) with the word's stress. For words with dominant stress, "different" responses were faster in the incongruent condition than the congruent condition. This congruency effect was not observed for words with nondominant stress pattern. Overall, the data suggest that stress information is based on lexical phonology, and the stress dominance effect has a lexical base in word recognition.

Reading without phonology: ERP evidence from skilled deaf readers of Spanish

Reading typically involves phonological mediation, especially for transparent orthographies with a regular letter to sound correspondence. In this study we ask whether phonological coding is a necessary part of the reading process by examining prelingually deaf individuals who are skilled readers of Spanish. We conducted two EEG experiments exploiting the pseudohomophone effect, in which nonwords that sound like words elicit phonological encoding during reading. The first, a semantic categorization task with masked priming, resulted in modulation of the N250 by pseudohomophone primes in hearing but not in deaf readers. The second, a lexical decision task, confirmed the pattern: hearing readers had increased errors and an attenuated N400 response for pseudohomophones compared to control pseudowords, whereas deaf readers did not treat pseudohomophones any differently from pseudowords, either behaviourally or in the ERP response. These results offer converging evidence that skilled deaf readers do not rely on phonological coding during visual word recognition. Furthermore, the finding demonstrates that reading can take place in the absence of phonological activation, and we speculate about the alternative mechanisms that allow these deaf individuals to read competently.

Developmental changes in neural letter-selectivity: A 1-year follow-up of beginning readers

The developmental course of neural tuning to visual letter strings is unclear. Here we tested 39 children longitudinally, at the beginning of grade 1 (6.45 ± 0.33 years old) and 1 year after, with fast periodic visual stimulation in electroencephalography to assess the evolution of selective neural responses to letter strings and their relationship with emerging reading abilities. At both grades, frequency-tagged letter strings were discriminated from pseudofont strings (i.e. letter-selectivity) over the left occipito-temporal cortex, with effects observed at the individual level in 62% of children. However, visual words were not discriminated from pseudowords (lexical access) at either grade. Following 1 year of schooling, letter-selective responses showed a specific increase in amplitude, a more complex pattern of harmonics, and were located more anteriorly over the left occipito-temporal cortex. Remarkably, at both grades, neural responses were highly significant at the individual level and correlated with individual reading scores. The amplitude increase in letter-selective responses between grades was not found for discrimination responses of familiar keyboard symbols from pseudosymbols, and was not related to a general increase in visual stimulation responses. These findings demonstrate a rapid onset of left hemispheric letter selectivity, with 1 year of reading instruction resulting in increased emerging reading abilities and a clear quantitative and qualitative evolution within left hemispheric neural circuits for reading.

Emotional Valence Coded in the Phonemic Content – Statistical Evidence Based on Corpus Analysis

This study investigates the relationship between the phonemic content of texts in English and the emotional valence they inspire. The sublexical content is presented in terms of biphones composed by one vowel and one consonant. The statistical analysis of a vast corpus of emotionally evaluated sentences reveals a strong correlation between this sublexical presentation and the evaluations of valence provided by the readers. An initial test performed with other valence-rated prose texts makes believing that the feature observed within the corpus can be useful for the emotion classification of texts.

Towards emotion recognition in texts: A sound-symbolic experiment

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between the phonetic content of prose texts in English and the emotion that the texts inspire, namely - the effect of vowel-consonant bi-phones on subjects’ evaluation of positive or negative emotional valence when reading. The methodology is based on data from an experiment where the participants, native speakers of three different languages, evaluated the valence invoked in them by one-page texts from English books. The sub-lexical level of the texts was obtained using phonetic transcriptions of the words and their further decomposition into vowel-consonant bi-phones. The statistical investigation relies on density-measures of the investigated bi-phones over each text as a whole. The result shows that there exists a correlation between the obtained sub-lexical representation and the valence perceived by the readers. Concerning the type of the consonants in the bi-phones (abrupt or sonorant), the influence of the abrupt bi-phones is stronger. However, sub-sets of both types of bi-phones showed relatedness with the emotional valence conveyed by the texts. In conclusion, the speech, expressed in written form, is laden with emotional valence even when the words’ lexicological meaning is not taken into consideration and the words are apprehended as mere phonetic constructs. This prompts hypothesizing that words’ semantics itself is partly underpinned by some mental emotion-related level of conceptualization, influenced by sounds. For practical purposes, the result suggests that based on the syllabic content of a text it should be possible to predict the valence that the text would inspire in its readers.

The Effects of Planning and Handwriting Style on Quantity Measures in Secondary School Children’s Writing

The study aimed to evaluate the proposer, translator, editor, and transcriber process model of writing in the context of secondary school children. Eighty-three children completed written texts under conditions that facilitated the proposer and placed resource demands on the transcriber. It was found that the number of words, lexical richness, and the number of sentences were affected by transcription resource demands, while the number of sentences was increased when the proposer was facilitated. There were also by-gender interactions that indicated male writers and female writers completed the tasks to different product levels. The discussion proposes that future developments of the model take into account a more direct interaction between the transcriber and translation level processes when considering this age group.

Articulatory Suppression and Phonological Codes in Reading for Meaning

The aim of this study was to investigate whether the phonological code that causes errors in printed sentence comprehension is affected by concurrent articulation. Forty adult subjects made speeded judgements of the acceptability of printed sentences. The critical sentences were foils that were (1) orthographi-cally unacceptable but phonologically acceptable (e.g. The palace had a thrown room), and (2) spelling controls that were orthographically and phonologically unacceptable (The palace had a thorns room). Half the subjects performed this task in silence (without concurrently articulating) and showed a marked phonological effect such that false alarms to phonologically acceptable foils were more frequent than false alarms to their spelling controls. The remaining subjects who performed this task with concurrent articulatory suppression showed an increase in false alarm rates, but no effect of phonology. In a control experiment using the same subjects, memory span for visually presented long and short words was measured under conditions of silence or concurrent articulation. The word length effect (Baddeley, Thomson, & Buchanan, 1975) disappeared under suppression, indicating that the suppression manipulation was highly effective. Thus the phonological codes that are used both in sentence comprehension and memory span are highly susceptible to articulatory suppression. We discuss possible relationships between phonological codes that mediate lexical access and those that support short-term verbal memory.

Effects of Phonological and Orthographic Neighbourhood Density Interact in Visual Word Recognition

The present study investigated the role of phonological and orthographic neighbourhood density in visual word recognition. Three mechanisms were identified that predict distinct facilitatory or inhibitory effects of each variable. The lexical competition account predicts overall inhibitory effects of neighbourhood density. The global activation (familiarity) account predicts overall facilitatory effects of neighbourhood density. Finally, the cross-code consistency account predicts an interaction, with inhibition of phonological neighbours in sparse orthographic regions and facilitation of phonological neighbours in dense orthographic regions. In Experiment 1 (lexical decision), a cross-over interaction was indeed found, supporting the prediction of the cross-code consistency account. In Experiment 2, this cross-over interaction was exaggerated by adding pseudohomo-phone stimuli (e.g., brane) among the nonword targets. Finally, in Experiment 3 (progressive demasking), we tried to shift the balance between inhibitory and facilitatory mechanisms by using a perceptual identification task. As predicted, the inhibitory effects of phonological neighbourhood were amplified, whereas the facilitatory effects disappeared. We conclude that the level of compatibility across co-activated orthographic and phonological representations is a major causal factor underlying this pattern of effects.

When a ROWS is a ROSE: Phonological Effects in Written Word Comprehension

When skilled readers make speeded categorization judgements about printed words, errors occur to homophones of real category exemplars. In Experiments 1 and 2, for example, subjects incorrectly accepted both the word STEAL (as a member of the category A METAL) and the nonword JEAP (as A VEHICLE) significantly more often than incorrect non-homophonic items matched in orthographic similarity to real exemplars. Experiment 3 demonstrated equivalent error rates for homophone targets differing from real exemplars by various types of single-letter change, but reduced error rates, especially for non-word homophones, when subjects were instructed to accept only correctly spelled instances. Experiments 4 and 5 established that the magnitude of the homophone effect is predicted by the degree of orthographic similarity between homophonic mates but not by spelling-sound regularity of the presented homophone. The results suggest that automatic phonological activation plays a major role in the comprehension of written words.

Phonological and orthographic coding in deaf skilled readers

Written language is very important in daily life. However, most deaf people do not achieve good reading levels compared to their hearing peers. Previous research has mainly focused on their difficulties when reading in a language with an opaque orthography such as English. In the present study, we investigated visual word recognition of deaf adult skilled readers while reading in Spanish, a language with a transparent orthography, for which obligatory phonological mediation has been claimed. Experiment 1 showed a pseudohomophone inhibitory effect in hearing but not in deaf people. Experiment 2 showed similar orthographic sensitivity, as measured by the transposed-letter effect, for both groups. These results suggest that deaf skilled readers do not rely on phonological mediation, while maintaining the same level of orthographic sensitivity as hearing readers, thus suggesting that the use of phonological coding is not required to access the lexicon and meaning in a language with a transparent orthography.

LESS SKILLED READERS HAVE LESS EFFICIENT SUPPRESSION MECHANISMS

One approach to understanding the component processes and mechanisms underlying adult reading skill is to compare the performance of more skilled and less skilled readers on laboratory experiments. The results of some recent experiments employing this approach demonstrate that less skilled adult readers suppress less efficiently the inappropriate meanings of ambiguous words (e.g., the playing card vs. garden tool meanings of spade), the incorrect forms of homophones (e.g., patients vs. patience), the typical-but-absent members of scenes (e.g., a tractor in a farm scene), and words superimposed on pictures. Less skilled readers are not less efficient in activating contextually appropriate information; in fact, they activate contextually appropriate information more strongly than more skilled readers do. Therefore, one conclusion that can be drawn from these experiments is that less skilled adult readers suffer from less efficient suppression mechanisms.

Analysis of Children’s Errors in Comprehension and Expression

Children’s oral language skills typically begin to develop sooner than their written language skills; however, the four language systems (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) then develop concurrently as integrated strands that influence one another. This research explored relationships between students’ errors in language comprehension of passages across oral and written modalities (listening and reading) and in language expression across oral and written modalities (speaking and writing). The data for this study were acquired during the standardization of the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement–Third Edition (KTEA-3). Correlational analyses from the total sample ( n = 2,443-3,552) and within grade bands revealed low to moderate correlations (.26-.50). No evidence of convergent or divergent validity was found when comparing correlations of “same-name” error types (e.g., inferential errors across modalities) with correlations of “different-name” error types. These results support previous research findings and hypotheses that language by ear, eye, hand, and mouth are separable but interacting systems that differ in more ways than modality of input/output.

A Phonological Reading Model for Technical Communicators

When people read silently, they unconsciously translate what they read into a speech-like code that facilitates word identification and the creation of meaning. This article examines that phenomenon—known as silent speech—based upon the published research of cognitive psychologists and psycholinguists. The author develops a phonological model of reading based upon published results of experimental investigators to determine the relationship between cognition and silent speech. The author then applies the model to technical communication. The applications include the use of punctuation, pronouns, and abbreviations, as well as introducing new words, writing to satisfy the speech instinct, cultivating a human voice, and revising technical documents.

The Evolution of the Speech Instinct in Silent Reading: Implications for Technical Communication

When people read silently, they unconsciously translate what they read into a speech-like code that facilitates word identification and the creation of meaning, especially when they read scientific and technical texts. Many studies have explored how this “silent speech” affects the reading process. As a follow-up to a previous article about applying a phonological reading model to technical communication, this article proposes that educators and practitioners of technical communication would benefit greatly from a thorough understanding of the speech instinct. Therefore, the author explores the speech instinct, how humans developed it, and how it has been and still is fostered by reading behavior and pedagogy.

Phonological Codes Are Automatically Activated During Reading: Evidence From an Eye Movement Priming Paradigm

Subjects read sentences containing target words that were homophones (words with a single pronunciation but different spellings) while their eye movements were recorded A prime word was presented briefly at the onset of fixation on the target region The prime for a given target (e g, beach) was either identical to the target (beach), a phonologically similar word (the homophone beech), a visually similar nonhomophone (bench), or a dissimilar word (noise) Phonological priming effects were assessed by comparing fixation times on the target when it was preceded by the homophone versus the visually similar word Results suggest that phonological codes are automatically activated during eye fixations in reading

Stroop interference associated with efficient reading fluency and prelexical orthographic processing

The Stroop Color-Word Test involves a dynamic interplay between reading and executive functioning that elicits intuitions of word reading automaticity. One such intuition is that strong reading skills (i.e., more automatized word reading) play a disruptive role within the test, contributing to Stroop interference. However, evidence has accumulated that challenges this intuition. The present study examined associations among Stroop interference, reading skills (i.e., isolated word identification, grapheme-to-phoneme mapping, phonemic awareness, reading fluency) measured on standardized tests, and orthographic skills measured on experimental computerized tasks. Among university students (N = 152), correlational analyses showed greater Stroop interference to be associated with (a) relatively low scores on all standardized reading tests, and (b) longer response latencies on orthographic tasks. Hierarchical regression demonstrated that reading fluency and prelexical orthographic processing predicted unique and significant variance in Stroop interference beyond baseline rapid naming. Results suggest that strong reading skills, including orthographic processing, play a supportive role in resolving Stroop interference.

A comparison of the letter-processing skills of hearing and deaf readers: evidence from five orthographies

This study was designed to examine the letter-processing skills of prelingually deaf and hearing students recruited from five different orthographic backgrounds (Hebrew, Arabic, English, German, and Turkish). Participants were 128 hearing and 133 deaf 6th-7th graders. They were tested with a same/different paradigm that assessed their ability to process letters under perceptual and conceptual conditions. Findings suggest that the letter-processing skills of deaf readers from some orthographic backgrounds may be underdeveloped in comparison to hearing counterparts. The finding that such letter-processing deficits were restricted to readers of some but not all of the tested orthographies warrants the conclusion that prelingual deafness, per se, does not impede the development of effective letter processing. Evidence for this study is discussed with reference to potential orthography-inherent and educational factors that may explain the existence of letter-processing deficits found in some of the prelingually deaf readers examined in this study.

Cognitive impairment in native Chinese with spinocerebellar ataxia type 3

BACKGROUND

Previous studies have shown cognitive impairment in patients with spinocerebellar ataxia type 3 (SCA3). However, there is a lack of data on Chinese patients with SCA3.

METHOD

We investigated 22 native Chinese with SCA3 and 18 controls matched for age, education as well as mental status. Cognitive assessments were carefully carried out to measure verbal fluency, memory, attention, executive function, visuospatial and visuoconstructive functions.

RESULTS

The most common impairments of cognition in native Chinese with SCA3 were disruption of phonemic verbal fluency and frontal executive dysfunction. Deficits in semantic fluency were detected in about 31.8% patients. Impaired visuospatial function and verbal memory were also found in native Chinese with SCA3. The degree of ataxia, CAG repeat length and education were found to correlate with cognitive performance. Multivariate binary logistic regression suggested that an oculomotor disorder and depression are predictors of cognitive impairment.

CONCLUSION

Native Chinese with SCA3 had cognitive impairment of frontal executive function, temporal and parietal functions. An oculomotor disorder might be an index of cognitive dysfunction.

Phonological recoding in error detection: a cross-sectional study in beginning readers of Dutch

The present cross-sectional study investigated the development of phonological recoding in beginning readers of Dutch, using a proofreading task with pseudohomophones and control misspellings. In Experiment 1, children in grades 1 to 3 rejected fewer pseudohomophones (e.g., wein, sounding like wijn 'wine') as spelling errors than control misspellings (e.g., wijg). The size of this pseudohomophone effect was larger in grade 1 than in grade 2 and did not differ between grades 2 and 3. In Experiment 2, we replicated the pseudohomophone effect in beginning readers and we tested how orthographic knowledge may modulate this effect. Children in grades 2 to 4 again detected fewer pseudohomophones than control misspellings and this effect decreased between grades 2 and 3 and between grades 3 and 4. The magnitude of the pseudohomophone effect was modulated by the development of orthographic knowledge: its magnitude decreased much more between grades 2 and 3 for more advanced spellers, than for less advanced spellers. The persistence of the pseudohomophone effect across all grades illustrates the importance of phonological recoding in Dutch readers. At the same time, the decreasing pseudohomophone effect across grades indicates the increasing influence of orthographic knowledge as reading develops.

Representing idioms: syntactic and contextual effects on idiom processing

Recent work on the processing of idiomatic expressions argues against the idea that idioms are simply big words. For example, hybrid models of idiom representation, originally investigated in the context of idiom production, propose a priority of literal computation, and a principled relationship between the conceptual meaning of an idiom, its literal lemmas and its syntactic structure. We examined the predictions of the hybrid representation hypothesis in the domain of idiom comprehension. We conducted two experiments to examine the role of syntactic, lexical and contextual factors on the interpretation of idiomatic expressions. Experiment I examines the role of syntactic compatibility and lexical compatibility on the real-time processing of potentially idiomatic strings. Experiment 2 examines the role of contextual information on idiom processing and how context interacts with lexical information during processing. We find evidence that literal computation plays a causal role in the retrieval of idiomatic meaning and that contextual, lexical and structural information influence the processing of idiomatic strings at early stages during processing, which provide support for the hybrid model of idiom representation in the domain of idiom comprehension.

Do Dyslexics Misread a ROWS for a ROSE?

Insufficient knowledge of the subtle relations between words' spellings and their phonology is widely held to be the primary limitation in developmental dyslexia. In the present study the influence of phonology on a semantic-based reading task was compared for groups of readers with and without dyslexia. As many studies have shown, skilled readers make phonology-based false-positive errors to homophones and pseudohomophones in the semantic categorization task. The basic finding was extended to children, teens, and adults with dyslexia from familial and clinically-referred samples. Dyslexics showed the same overall pattern of phonology errors and the results were consistent across dyslexia samples, across age groups, and across experimental conditions using word and nonword homophone foils. The dyslexic groups differed from chronological-age matched controls by having elevated false-positive homophone error rates overall, and weaker effects of baseword frequency. Children with dyslexia also made more false-positive errors to spelling control foils. These findings suggest that individuals with dyslexia make use of phonology when making semantic decisions both to word homophone and non-word pseudohomophone foils and that dyslexics lack adequate knowledge of actual word spellings, compared to chronological-age and reading-level matched control participants.

A comparison of lexical-gustatory and grapheme-colour synaesthesia

This study compares two different profiles of synaesthesia. One group (N = 7) experiences synaesthetic colour and the other (N = 7) experiences taste. Both groups are significantly more consistent over time than control subjects asked to generate analogous associations. For the colour synaesthetes, almost every word elicits a colour photism and there are systematic relationships between the colours generated by words and those generated by graphemes within the word (hence "grapheme-colour" synaesthesia). For the taste synaesthetes, by contrast, some words elicit no synaesthesia at all, and in those words that do, there is no relationship between the taste attributed to the word and the taste attributed to component graphemes. Word frequency and lexicality (word vs. nonword) appear to be critical in determining the presence of synaesthesia in this group (hence "lexical-gustatory" synaesthesia). Moreover, there are strong phonological links (e.g., cinema tastes of "cinnamon rolls") suggesting that the synaesthetic associations have been influenced by vocabulary knowledge from the semantic category of food. It is argued that different cognitive mechanisms are responsible for the synaesthesia in each group, which may reflect, at least in part, the different geographical locations of the affected perceptual centres in the brain.

A connectionist perspective on the development of reading skills in children

The development of decoding skills has traditionally been viewed as a stage-like process during which children's reading strategies change as a consequence of the acquisition of phonological awareness. More explicit accounts of the mechanisms involved in learning to read are provided by recent connectionist models in which children learn mappings initially between orthography and phonology, and later between orthography, phonology and semantics. Evidence from studies of reading development suggests that learning to read is determined primarily by the status of a child's phonological representations and is therefore compromised in dyslexic children who have phonological deficits. Children who have language impairments encompassing deficits in semantic representations have qualitatively different reading problems centring on difficulties with reading comprehension and in learning to read exception words.

Don't shoot the messnger: memory for misspellings in context

Misspellings in sentences are usually easy to understand by readers due to top-down influences. Although top-down processing allows for fluent reading of misspelled items, the nature of their representations in memory is not known. If representations of misspellings are distinct from representations of correctly spelled words, their influence should be seen in later recognition decisions. In this set of experiments, participants read words and misspellings embedded in sentences and were later given a recognition test. The sentences contained semantically biased or neutral contexts. In Experiment 1, misspellings were created by removing a single letter (e.g., drveway). In Experiment 2, the recognition items probes were presented in uppercase letters (e.g., DRVEWAY) to reduce the visual similarity between study and test items. In Experiment 3, the misspellings were created by substituting visually similar letters (e.g., driweway). In contrast to the previous experiments, in Experiment 4, participants were explicitly told about the memory test to see how response strategies affect performance. Overall, the results indicate that people retain surface feature information about misspellings which seem to inform their memory judgments, and that the processing of this information cannot be strategically controlled.

Lexical processing in individuals with high-functioning autism and Asperger's disorder

The presence or absence of clinically delayed language development prior to 3 years of age is a key, but contentious, clinical feature distinguishing autism from Asperger's disorder. The aim of this study was to examine language processing in children with high-functioning autism (HFA) and Asperger's disorder (AD) using a task which taps lexical processing, a core language ability. Eleven individuals with HFA, 11 with AD and 11 typically developing (TD) individuals completed a masked priming task, a psycholinguistic paradigm that directly examines lexical processes. Within-group analyses revealed the AD and TD groups had intact lexical processing systems and orthographic processing of the written word. The outcomes for the HFA group were ambiguous, suggesting that their lexical processing system is either delayed or is structurally different. This suggests that fundamental differences in lexical processing exist between HFA and AD and remain evident later in development.

Distinct representations of subtraction and multiplication in the neural systems for numerosity and language

It has been proposed that recent cultural inventions such as symbolic arithmetic recycle evolutionary older neural mechanisms. A central assumption of this hypothesis is that the degree to which a preexisting mechanism is recycled depends on the degree of similarity between its initial function and the novel task. To test this assumption, we investigated whether the brain region involved in magnitude comparison in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), localized by a numerosity comparison task, is recruited to a greater degree by arithmetic problems that involve number comparison (single-digit subtractions) than by problems that involve retrieving number facts from memory (single-digit multiplications). Our results confirmed that subtractions are associated with greater activity in the IPS than multiplications, whereas multiplications elicit greater activity than subtractions in regions involved in verbal processing including the middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) that were localized by a phonological processing task. Pattern analyses further indicated that the neural mechanisms more active for subtraction than multiplication in the IPS overlap with those involved in numerosity comparison and that the strength of this overlap predicts interindividual performance in the subtraction task. These findings provide novel evidence that elementary arithmetic relies on the cooption of evolutionary older neural circuits.

The Sound of Enemies and Friends in the Neighborhood

Previous studies (e.g., Pecher, Zeelenberg, & Wagenmakers, 2005) found that semantic classification performance is better for target words with orthographic neighbors that are mostly from the same semantic class (e.g., living) compared to target words with orthographic neighbors that are mostly from the opposite semantic class (e.g., nonliving). In the present study we investigated the contribution of phonology to orthographic neighborhood effects by comparing effects of phonologically congruent orthographic neighbors (book-hook) to phonologically incongruent orthographic neighbors (sand-wand). The prior presentation of a semantically congruent word produced larger effects on subsequent animacy decisions when the previously presented word was a phonologically congruent neighbor than when it was a phonologically incongruent neighbor. In a second experiment, performance differences between target words with versus without semantically congruent orthographic neighbors were larger if the orthographic neighbors were also phonologically congruent. These results support models of visual word recognition that assume an important role for phonology in cascaded access to meaning.

Modulation of brain regions involved in word recognition by homophonous stimuli: an fMRI study

We used rapid event-related fMRI to explore factors modulating the activation of orthographic and phonological representations of print during a visual lexical decision task. Stimuli included homophonous word and nonword stimuli (MAID, BRANE), which have been shown behaviorally to produce longer response times due to phonological mediation effects. We also manipulated participants' reliance on orthography by varying the extent to which nonword foils were orthographically typical (wordlike context) or atypical (non-wordlike context) of real words. Key findings showed that reading low-frequency homophones in the wordlike context produced activation in regions associated with phonological processing (i.e., opercular region of the left inferior frontal gyrus [IFG; BA 44]), the integration of orthography and phonology (i.e., the inferior parietal lobule (IPL), and lexicosemantic processing (i.e., left middle temporal gyrus, [MTG]). Pseudohomophones in the wordlike context produced greater activity relative to other nonword trials in regions engaged during both phonological processing (i.e., left IFG/precentral gyrus; BA 6/9]), and semantic processing (triangular region of the left IFG; BA 47). Homophonous effects in the non-wordlike context were primarily isolated to medial extrastriate regions, hypothesized to be involved in low level visual processing and not reading-related processing per se. These findings demonstrate that the degree to which phonological and orthographic representations of print are activated depends not only on homophony, but also on the word-likeness of nonword stimuli. Implications for models of visual word recognition are discussed.

Word and pseudoword superiority effects reflected in the ERP waveform

A variant of the Reicher-Wheeler task was used to determine when in the event-related potential (ERP) waveform indices of word and pseudoword superiority effects might be present, and whether ERP measures of superiority effects correlated with standardized behavioral measures of orthographic fluency and single word reading. ERPs were recorded to briefly presented, masked letter strings that included real words (DARK/PARK), pseudowords (DARL/PARL), nonwords (RDKA/RPKA), and letter-in-xs (DXXX, PXXX) stimuli. Participants decided which of two letters occurred at a given position in the string (here, forced-choice alternatives D and P). Behaviorally, both word (more accurate choices for letters in words than in baseline nonwords or letter-in-xs) and pseudoword (more accurate choices for letters in pseudowords than in baseline conditions) superiority effects were observed. Electrophysiologically, effects of orthographic regularity and familiarity were apparent as early as the P150 time window (100-160ms), an effect of lexicality was observed as early as the N200 time window (160-200ms), and peak amplitude of the N300 and N400 also differentiated word and pseudoword as compared to baseline stimuli. Further, the size of the P150 and N400 ERP word superiority effects was related to standardized behavioral measures of fluency and reading. Results suggest that orthographic fluency is reflected in both lower-level, sublexical, perceptual processing and higher-level, lexical processing in fluently reading adults.

Is a FAN always FUN? Phonological and orthographic effects in bilingual visual word recognition

A visual semantic categorization task in English was performed by native English speakers (Experiment 1) and late bilinguals whose first language was Japanese (Experiment 2) or Spanish (Experiment 3). In the critical conditions, the target word was a homophone of a correct category exemplar (e.g., A BODY OF WATER--SEE; cf. SEA) or a word that differed from the correct exemplar by a phonological contrast absent in the bilinguals' first language (e.g., USED FOR COOLING DOWN--FUN; cf. FAN). Homophones elicited more false positive errors and slower processing than spelling controls in all groups. The Japanese-English bilinguals, but not the Spanish-English bilinguals, also displayed 'near-homophone' effects (i.e., homophone-like effects from minimal pairs on nonnative contrasts). We conclude that second-language visual word recognition is influenced by first-language phonology, although the effect is conditioned by the first-language orthographic system. Near-homophone effects can occur when the orthographic systems of the late bilingual's two languages are different in type (e.g., alphabetic vs. non-alphabetic), but may be blocked if the languages use the same writing script (e.g., Roman alphabet).

Phonological activation in chinese reading: an event-related potential study using low-resolution electromagnetic tomography

The aim of the present study was to examine the pattern of phonological activation during Chinese sentence reading. Terminal words in high cloze sentences were manipulated across six conditions defined by word frequency and ending types. The P200 was smaller for the congruent targets than for the unrelated control targets, while there were no differences between the homophonic and unrelated control targets. No frequency effect on the P200 was observed. More importantly, a reduced N400 to the homophonic words was observed independent of word frequency. Source analysis by low resolution electromagnetic tomography (LORETA) revealed that the highly activated areas for the P200 were located at bilateral superior frontal (BA 6) and occipital (BA 17, 18 and 19) areas, while the N400 was located at left medial frontal (BA 6) area. These findings suggest that phonology is activated automatically for both high- and low-frequency words during Chinese sentence reading, even when the task is not focused on pronunciation.

Acquiring an Artificial Logographic Orthography

To date, studies have focused on the acquisition of alphabetic second languages in alphabetic first language (L1) users, demonstrating significant transfer effects. The present study examines the process from a reverse perspective, comparing logographic (Mandarin-Chinese) and alphabetic (English) L1 users in the acquisition of an artificial logographic script to determine whether similar language-specific advantageous transfer effects occurred. Chinese-English bilinguals, English-French bilinguals, and English monolinguals learned a small set of symbols (six nouns and six verbs) in an artificial logographic script. A lexical decision task on the artificial symbols revealed markedly faster response times in the Chinese-English bilinguals, indicating a logographic transfer effect suggestive of a language experience— specific advantage. A syntactic decision task evaluated the degree to which the new language was mastered beyond the single word level. No L1-specific transfer effects were found for artificial language strings. However, when carrying out the same task in the native language, both the Chinese-English and the English-French bilinguals outperformed the English monolinguals, indicative of a bilingual processing advantage. The results are discussed in relation to possible differences in processing styles relating to logographic versus alphabetic languages, variably involving visual versus phonological coding.