A ROWS is a ROSE: spelling, sound, and reading

Production benefits on encoding are modulated by language experience: Less experience may help

Several lines of research have shown that performing movements while learning new information aids later retention of that information, compared to learning by perception alone. For instance, articulated words are more accurately remembered than words that are silently read (the production effect). A candidate mechanism for this movement-enhanced encoding, sensorimotor prediction, assumes that acquired sensorimotor associations enable movements to prime associated percepts and hence improve encoding. Yet it is still unknown how the extent of prior sensorimotor experience influences the benefits of movement on encoding. The current study addressed this question by examining whether the production effect is modified by prior language experience. Does the production effect reduce or persist in a second language (L2) compared to a first language (L1)? Two groups of unbalanced bilinguals, German (L1) - English (L2) bilinguals (Experiment 1) and English (L1) - German (L2) bilinguals (Experiment 2), learned lists of German and English words by reading the words silently or reading the words aloud, and they subsequently performed recognition tests. Both groups showed a pronounced production effect (higher recognition accuracy for spoken compared to silently read words) in the first and second languages. Surprisingly, the production effect was greater in the second languages compared to the first languages, across both bilingual groups. We discuss interpretations based on increased phonological encoding, increased effort or attention, or both, when reading aloud in a second language.

TURead: An eye movement dataset of Turkish reading

In this study, we present TURead, an eye movement dataset of silent and oral sentence reading in Turkish, an agglutinative language with a shallow orthography understudied in reading research. TURead provides empirical data to investigate the relationship between morphology and oculomotor control. We employ a target-word approach in which target words are manipulated by word length and by the addition of two commonly used suffixes in Turkish. The dataset contains well-established eye movement variables; prelexical characteristics such as vowel harmony and bigram-trigram frequencies and word features, such as word length, predictability, frequency, eye voice span measures, Cloze test scores of the root word and suffix predictabilities, as well as the scores obtained from two working memory tests. Our findings on fixation parameters and word characteristics are in line with the patterns reported in the relevant literature.

Linguistic Illusions Guide Eye Movement: Evidence From Doubling

Across languages, certain phonological patterns are preferred to others (e.g., blog > lbog). But whether such preferences arise from abstract linguistic constraints or sensorimotor pressures is controversial. We address this debate by examining the constraints on doubling (e.g., slaflaf, generally, XX). Doubling demonstrably elicits conflicting responses (aversion or preference), depending on the linguistic level of analysis (phonology vs. morphology). Since the stimulus remains unchanged, the shifting responses imply abstract constraints. Here, we ask whether these constraints apply online, in eye movements. Experiment 1 shows that, in bare phonological forms, doubling is dispreferred, and correspondingly it elicits shorter fixations. Remarkably, when doubling signals morphological plurality, the aversion shifts into preference, in Experiment 2. Our results demonstrate for the first time that the constraints on doubling apply online. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that phonological knowledge arises, in part, from an abstract linguistic source.

Chinese offers a test for universal cognitive processes

The Chinese writing system is unique in its implementation of graphemic, phonological, morphological, and semantic features. We add nuances to its portrait in the target article and highlight research on radically different timelines of phonological and semantic activation during reading of Chinese and alphabetic script, paving the way for the identification of universal and culture-specific cognitive processing.

PHOR-in-One: A multilingual lexical database with PHonological, ORthographic and PHonographic word similarity estimates in four languages

A large body of research seeking to explore how form affects lexical processing in bilinguals has suggested that orthographically similar translations (e.g., English-Portuguese "paper-papel") are responded to more quickly and accurately than words with little to no overlap (e.g., English-Portuguese "house-casa"). One of the most prominent algorithms to estimate orthographic similarity, the normalized Levenshtein distance (NLD), returns an index of the proportion of identical characters of two strings, and is an efficient and invaluable tool for the selection, manipulation, and control of verbal stimuli. Notwithstanding its many advantages for second-language research, the absence of a comparable measure for phonology has resulted in the adoption of different strategies to assess the degree of interlanguage phonological similarity across the literature, with profound implications for the interpretation of results on the relative role of orthographic and phonological similarity in bilingual lexical access. In the present work, we introduce PHOR-in-One, a multilingual lexical database with a set of phonological and orthographic NLD estimates for 6160 translation equivalents in American and British English, European Portuguese, German and Spanish in a total of 30,800 words. We also propose a new measure of phonographic NLD, a pooled index of orthographic and phonological similarity, particularly useful for researchers interested in controlling for and/or manipulating both estimates at once. PHOR-in-One includes a comprehensive characterization of its lexical entries, namely Part-of-Speech-dependent and independent frequency counts, number of letters and phonemes, and phonetic transcription. PHOR-in-One is thus a valuable tool to support bilingual and multilingual research.

No Correlation Between Articulation Speed and Silent Reading Rate when Adults Read Short Texts

Silent reading often involves phonological encoding of the text in addition to orthographic processing. The nature of the phonological code is debated, however: Is it an abstract code or does it contain information about the pronunciation of the visual stimulus? To answer this question, we investigated the relationship between articulation speed and reading speed, both for silent reading and reading aloud. We investigated whether people with fast articulation speed read faster than people with slow articulation speed. We recruited 94 participants, who in a Zoom session were asked to read short texts silently or aloud. They were also asked to talk about their lives and say the numbers 1-10 or the months of the year as quickly as possible. Finally, they completed an online vocabulary test and an author recognition test. Multiple regression analysis and cluster analysis showed that although the speed of reading aloud and silent reading correlated to some extent, they belonged to two different clusters. Reading aloud was mainly related to talking fluency and articulation speed, while silent reading was more related to vocabulary and knowledge about fiction authors. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the phonological code in silent reading typically does not contain articulatory information, although our data do not rule out the possibility that this may be the case for a small percentage of people or when people read more difficult texts.

Does MOED Rhyme with FRUIT? An event-related potential study of cross-language rhyming

The study aimed to characterize the event-related potentials signature elicited by visual rhyme judgements across two alphabetic orthographies that differ in depth (shallow: Dutch; deep: English) and by spelling-sound consistency in a deep L2-English orthography. Twenty-four Dutch-English bilinguals who varied on measures of L2-English proficiency, made rhyme judgments of semantically unrelated Dutch-English word pairs presented sequentially in the visual modality, while behavioral and electrophysiological responses were recorded. The spelling-sound consistency of target words was varied systematically. Nonrhyming targets elicited a larger N450 amplitude than rhyming targets, indicating sensitivity to mismatching phonology across languages. English target words with consistent spelling-sound mappings elicited less negative N250 amplitudes when preceded by rhyming Dutch primes. Overall, event-related potentials revealed robust responses to phonological mismatch, but subtle responses to spelling-sound inconsistency in L2-English. Results suggest that bilingual readers of a shallow L1 orthography who are immersed in an L1-speaking environment may not tune into the degree of spelling-sound consistency of a deep L2 orthography.

Can Translation Equivalents in L1 Activated by L2 Produce Homophonic Interference: An Eye Movement Study of Cross-Language Lexical Activation in Chinese English Learners

This study used an eye-tracking method to examine whether Chinese translation equivalents activated by English prime words can continue to activate their Chinese homophones. With 30 English prime words, and 60 Chinese target words as materials, the experiment used a Tobii eye-tracking device to collect data from 30 university students while completing an English-Chinese lexical semantic-judgment task, aimed at investigating whether (1) when Chinese English learners see the English words, they can activate the homophones of Chinese translation equivalents; and (2) there is a word frequency effect in cross-language lexical activation, i.e., Chinese translation equivalents with different word frequencies have different effects on the activation speed. Compared with low-frequency Chinese translation equivalents, high-frequency Chinese equivalents can facilitate the activation faster and easier. The two research hypotheses were confirmed on several eye movement indicators, supporting the cross-language lexical activation as well as word-frequency effect of Chinese translation equivalents. This is also the first verification of cross-language dual-link lexical activation which engage both semantics and phonology, indicating that L2-L1 semantic activation has strong stability for further phonological activation.

Effects of orthographic transparency on rhyme judgement

This study investigated the influence of multiliteracy in opaque orthographies on phonological awareness. Using a visual rhyme judgement task in English, we assessed phonological processing in three multilingual and multiliterate populations who were distinguished by the transparency of the orthographies they can read in (N = 135; ages 18-40). The first group consisted of 45 multilinguals literate in English and a transparent Latin orthography like Malay; the second group consisted of 45 multilinguals literate in English and transparent orthographies like Malay and Arabic; and the third group consisted of 45 multilinguals literate in English, transparent orthographies, and Mandarin Chinese, an opaque orthography. Results showed that all groups had poorer performance in the two opaque conditions: rhyming pairs with different orthographic endings and non-rhyming pairs with similar orthographic endings, with the latter posing the greatest difficulty. Subjects whose languages consisted of half or more opaque orthographies performed significantly better than subjects who knew more transparent orthographies than opaque orthographies. The findings are consistent with past studies that used the visual rhyme judgement paradigm and suggest that literacy experience acquired over time relating to orthographic transparency may influence performance on phonological awareness tasks.

Speaker Accent Modulates the Effects of Orthographic and Phonological Similarity on Auditory Processing by Learners of English

The cognate effect refers to translation equivalents with similar form between languages-i.e., cognates, such as "band" (English) and "banda" (Spanish)-being processed faster than words with dissimilar forms-such as, "cloud" and "nube." Substantive literature supports this claim, but is mostly based on orthographic similarity and tested in the visual modality. In a previous study, we found an inhibitory orthographic similarity effect in the auditory modality-i.e., greater orthographic similarity led to slower response times and reduced accuracy. The aim of the present study is to explain this effect. In doing so, we explore the role of the speaker's accent in auditory word recognition and whether native accents lead to a mismatch between the participants' phonological representation and the stimulus. Participants carried out a lexical decision task and a typing task in which they spelled out the word they heard. Words were produced by two speakers: one with a native English accent (Standard American) and the other with a non-native accent matching that of the participants (native Spanish speaker from Spain). We manipulated orthographic and phonological similarity orthogonally and found that accent did have some effect on both response time and accuracy as well as modulating the effects of similarity. Overall, the non-native accent improved performance, but it did not fully explain why high orthographic similarity items show an inhibitory effect in the auditory modality. Theoretical implications and future directions are discussed.

Frequency Effects on Spelling Error Recognition: An ERP Study

Spelling errors are ubiquitous in all writing systems. Most studies exploring spelling errors focused on the phonological plausibility of errors. However, unlike typical pseudohomophones, spelling errors occur in naturally produced written language. We investigated the time course of recognition of the most frequent orthographic errors in Russian (error in an unstressed vowel in the root) and the effect of word frequency on this process. During event-related potentials (ERP) recording, 26 native Russian speakers silently read high-frequency correctly spelled words, low-frequency correctly spelled words, high-frequency words with errors, and low-frequency words with errors. The amplitude of P200 was more positive for correctly spelled words than for misspelled words and did not depend on the frequency of the words. In addition, in the 350–500-ms time window, we found a more negative response for misspelled words than for correctly spelled words in parietal–temporal-occipital regions regardless of word frequency. Considering our results in the context of a dual-route model, we concluded that recognizing misspelled high-frequency and low-frequency words involves common orthographic and phonological processes associated with P200 and N400 components such as whole word orthography processing and activation of phonological representations correspondingly. However, at the 500–700 ms stage (associated with lexical-semantic access in our study), error recognition depends on the word frequency. One possible explanation for these differences could be that at the 500–700 ms stage recognition of high-frequency misspelled and correctly spelled words shifts from phonological to orthographic processes, while low-frequency misspelled words are accompanied by more prolonged phonological activation. We believe these processes may be associated with different ERP components P300 and N400, reflecting a temporal overlap between categorization processes based on orthographic properties for high-frequency words and phonological processes for low-frequency words. Therefore, our results complement existing reading models and demonstrate that the neuronal underpinnings of spelling error recognition during reading may depend on word frequency.

Is phonological deficit a necessary or sufficient condition for Chinese reading disability?

While phonological skills have been found to be correlated with reading across different writing systems, recent findings have shown that developmental dyslexia in Chinese individuals has multiple deficits, and no single factor has ever been identified as crucial for learning this writing system. To examine whether a deficit in the phonological or another cognitive domain is a necessary or sufficient condition for Chinese reading disability, this study examined the cognitive profiles of 521 good readers and 502 dyslexic readers in Chinese primary schools using a battery of behavioral measures covering phonological, visual, orthographic, visual-motor coordination and working memory skills. The results showed that among all cognitive measures, phonological skills correlated more strongly with character reading performance but that poor phonological skills did not necessarily or sufficiently lead to poor reading performance in Chinese.

Stereotypical Processing of Emotional Faces: Perceptual and Decisional Components

People tend to associate anger with male faces and happiness or surprise with female faces. This angry-men-happy-women bias has been ascribed to either top-down (e.g., well-learned stereotypes) or bottom-up (e.g., shared morphological cues) processes. The dissociation between these two theoretical alternatives has proved challenging. The current effort addresses this challenge by harnessing two complementary metatheoretical approaches to dimensional interaction: Garner's logic of inferring informational structure and General Recognition Theory—a multidimensional extension of signal detection theory. Conjoint application of these two rigorous methodologies afforded us to: (a) uncover the internal representations that generate the angry-men-happy-women phenomenon, (b) disentangle varieties of perceptual (bottom-up) and decisional (top-down) sources of interaction, and (c) relate operational and theoretical meanings of dimensional independence. The results show that the dimensional interaction between emotion and gender is generated by varieties of perceptual and decisional biases. These outcomes document the involvement of both bottom-up (e.g., shared morphological structures) and top-down (stereotypes) factors in social perception.

Inhibitory and facilitatory effects of phonological and orthographic similarity on L2 word recognition across modalities in bilinguals

Language perception studies on bilinguals often show that words that share form and meaning across languages (cognates) are easier to process than words that share only meaning. This facilitatory phenomenon is known as the cognate effect. Most previous studies have shown this effect visually, whereas the auditory modality as well as the interplay between type of similarity and modality remain largely unexplored. In this study, highly proficient late Spanish–English bilinguals carried out a lexical decision task in their second language, both visually and auditorily. Words had high or low phonological and orthographic similarity, fully crossed. We also included orthographically identical words (perfect cognates). Our results suggest that similarity in the same modality (i.e., orthographic similarity in the visual modality and phonological similarity in the auditory modality) leads to improved signal detection, whereas similarity across modalities hinders it. We provide support for the idea that perfect cognates are a special category within cognates. Results suggest a need for a conceptual and practical separation between types of similarity in cognate studies. The theoretical implication is that the representations of items are active in both modalities of the non-target language during language processing, which needs to be incorporated to our current processing models.

Farey Trees Explain Sequential Effects in Choice Response Time

The latencies of successive two-alternative, forced-choice response times display intricately patterned sequential effects, or dependencies. They vary as a function of particular trial-histories, and in terms of the order and identity of previously presented stimuli and registered responses. This article tests a novel hypothesis that sequential effects are governed by dynamic principles, such as those entailed by a discrete sine-circle map adaptation of the Haken Kelso Bunz (HKB) bimanual coordination model. The model explained the sequential effects expressed in two classic sequential dependency data sets. It explained the rise of a repetition advantage, the acceleration of repeated affirmative responses, in tasks with faster paces. Likewise, the model successfully predicted an alternation advantage, the acceleration of interleaved affirmative and negative responses, when a task’s pace slows and becomes more variable. Detailed analyses of five studies established oscillatory influences on sequential effects in the context of balanced and biased trial presentation rates, variable pacing, progressive and differential cognitive loads, and dyadic performance. Overall, the empirical patterns revealed lawful oscillatory constraints governing sequential effects in the time-course and accuracy of performance across a broad continuum of recognition and decision activities.

Language development in deaf bilinguals: Deaf middle school students co-activate written English and American Sign Language during lexical processing

Bilinguals, both hearing and deaf, activate multiple languages simultaneously even in contexts that require only one language. To date, the point in development at which bilingual signers experience cross-language activation of a signed and a spoken language remains unknown. We investigated the processing of written words by ASL-English bilingual deaf middle school students. Deaf bilinguals were faster to respond to English word pairs with phonologically related translations in ASL than to English word pairs with unrelated translations, but no difference was found for hearing controls with no knowledge of ASL. The results indicate that co-activation of signs and written words is not the outcome of years of bilingual experience, but instead characterizes bilingual language development.

An ERP Study on the Role of Phonological Processing in Reading Two-Character Compound Chinese Words of High and Low Frequency

Unlike in English, the role of phonology in word recognition in Chinese is unclear. In this event-related potential experiment, we investigated the role of phonology in reading both high- and low-frequency two-character compound Chinese words. Participants executed semantic and homophone judgment tasks of the same precede-target pairs. Each pair of either high- or low-frequency words were either unrelated (control condition) or related semantically or phonologically (homophones). The induced P200 component was greater for low- than for high-frequency word-pairs both in semantic and phonological tasks. Homophones in the semantic judgment task and semantically-related words in the phonology task both elicited a smaller N400 than the control condition, word frequency-independently. However, for low-frequency words in the phonological judgment task, it was found that the semantically related pairs released a significantly larger P200 than the control condition. Thus, the semantic activation of both high- and low-frequency words may be no later than phonological activation.

Functional connectivity in the developing language network in 4-year-old children predicts future reading ability

Understanding how pre-literate children's language abilities and neural function relate to future reading ability is important for identifying children who may be at-risk for reading problems. Pre-literate children are already proficient users of spoken language and their developing brain networks for language become highly overlapping with brain networks that emerge during literacy acquisition. In the present longitudinal study, we examined language abilities, and neural activation and connectivity within the language network in pre-literate children (mean age = 4.2 years). We tested how language abilities, brain activation, and connectivity predict children's reading abilities 1 year later (mean age = 5.2 years). At Time 1, children (n = 37) participated in a functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) experiment of speech processing (listening to words and pseudowords) and completed a standardized battery of language and cognitive assessments. At Time 2, children (n = 28) completed standardized reading assessments. Using psychophysiological interaction (PPI) analyses, we observed significant connectivity between the left IFG and right STG in pre-literate children, which was modulated by task (i.e., listening to words). Neural activation in left IFG and STG and increased task-modulated connectivity between the left IFG and right STG was predictive of multiple reading outcomes. Increased connectivity was associated later with increased reading ability.

Measuring the influence of phonological neighborhood on visual word recognition with the N400: Evidence for semantic scaffolding

Research in visual word recognition has shown that phonological neighborhood density facilitates visual word recognition. The current research was designed to determine the electrophysiological effect of phonological neighborhood density (PND). In two experiments, participants made lexical decisions to words varying on phonological neighborhood while Event-related Potentials (ERPs) were recorded. Behaviorally, the results replicate previous research by showing that words with many phonological neighbors were responded to more rapidly than were words with few phonological neighbors. However, the main contribution of the current research is that it shows an effect of PND on the N400 and Late Positive Component Event-Related Potentials. In contrast to previous reports in the literature, the nature of the effect was such that the N400 was larger to words with few phonological neighbors than to words with many. Experiment 2 replicated these findings and provided estimates of the independent components' time course and source localization. The increased N400 for small neighborhood words is thought to reflect additional semantic processing required for these words due their weaker phonological representations.

Miller's monkey updated: Communicative efficiency and the statistics of words in natural language

Is language designed for communicative and functional efficiency? G. K. Zipf famously argued that shorter words are more frequent because they are easier to use, thereby resulting in the statistical law that bears his name. Yet, G. A. Miller showed that even a monkey randomly typing at a keyboard, and intermittently striking the space bar, would generate "words" with similar statistical properties. Recent quantitative analyses of human language lexicons (Piantadosi et al., 2012) have revived Zipf's functionalist hypothesis. Ambiguous words tend to be short, frequent, and easy to articulate in language production. Such statistical findings are commonly interpreted as evidence for pressure for efficiency, as the context of language use often provides cues to overcome lexical ambiguity. In this study, we update Miller's monkey thought experiment to incorporate empirically motivated phonological and semantic constraints on the creation of words. We claim that the appearance of communicative efficiency is a spandrel (Gould & Lewontin, 1979), as lexicons formed without the context of language use or reference to communication or efficiency exhibit comparable statistical properties. Furthermore, the updated monkey model provides a good fit for the growth trajectory of English as recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. Focusing on the history of English words since 1900, we show that lexicons resulting from the monkey model provide a better embodiment of communicative efficiency than the actual lexicon of English. We conclude by arguing for the need to go beyond correlational statistics and to seek direct evidence for the mechanisms that underlie principles of language design.

Neural pattern similarity across concept exemplars predicts memory after a long delay

The irregularities of the world ensure that each interaction we have with a concept is unique. In order to generalize across these unique encounters to form a high-level representation of a concept, we must draw on similarities between exemplars to form new conceptual knowledge that is maintained over a long time. Two neural similarity measures - pattern robustness and encoding-retrieval similarity - are particularly important for predicting memory outcomes. In this study, we used fMRI to measure activity patterns while people encoded and retrieved novel pairings between unfamiliar (Dutch) words and visually presented animal species. We address two underexplored questions: 1) whether neural similarity measures can predict memory outcomes, despite perceptual variability between presentations of a concept and 2) if pattern similarity measures can predict subsequent memory over a long delay (i.e., one month). Our findings indicate that pattern robustness during encoding in brain regions that include parietal and medial temporal areas is an important predictor of subsequent memory. In addition, we found significant encoding-retrieval similarity in the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex after a month's delay. These findings demonstrate that pattern similarity is an important predictor of memory for novel word-animal pairings even when the concept includes multiple exemplars. Importantly, we show that established predictive relationships between pattern similarity and subsequent memory do not require visually identical stimuli (i.e., are not simply due to low-level visual overlap between stimulus presentations) and are maintained over a month.

The Effect of Word Predictability on Phonological Activation in Cantonese Reading: A Study of Eye-Fixations and Pupillary Response

This study aimed to investigate the effects of contextual predictability on orthographic and phonological activation during Chinese sentence reading by Cantonese-speaking readers using the error disruption paradigm. Participants' eye fixations and pupil sizes were recorded while they silently read Chinese sentences containing homophonic, orthographic, and unrelated errors. Sentences had varying amounts of contextual information leading up to target words such that some targets were more predictable than others. Results of the fixation time analysis indicated that orthographic effects were significant in first fixation and gaze duration, while phonological effects emerged later in total reading time. However, interactions between predictability and the homophonic condition were found in gaze duration. These results suggest that, while Cantonese readers activate word meanings primarily through orthography in early processing, early phonological activation can occur when facilitated by semantics in high-constraint sentence contexts. Analysis of pupillary response measurements revealed that participants' pupil sizes became larger when they read words containing orthographic errors, suggesting that orthographic error recovery processes significantly increase cognitive load.

The role of phonology in lexical access in teenagers with a history of dyslexia

We examined phonological recoding during silent sentence reading in teenagers with a history of dyslexia and their typically developing peers. Two experiments are reported in which participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing correctly spelled words (e.g., church), pseudohomophones (e.g., cherch), and spelling controls (e.g., charch). In Experiment 1 we examined foveal processing of the target word/nonword stimuli, and in Experiment 2 we examined parafoveal pre-processing. There were four participant groups-older teenagers with a history of dyslexia, older typically developing teenagers who were matched for age, younger typically developing teenagers who were matched for reading level, and younger teenagers with a history of dyslexia. All four participant groups showed a pseudohomophone advantage, both from foveal processing and parafoveal pre-processing, indicating that teenagers with a history of dyslexia engage in phonological recoding for lexical identification during silent sentence reading in a comparable manner to their typically developing peers.

Cognate facilitation in Frisian-Dutch bilingual children's sentence reading: An eye-tracking study

Bilingual adults are faster in reading cognates than in reading non-cognates in both their first language (L1) and second language (L2). This cognate effect has been shown to be gradual: recognition was facilitated when words had higher degrees of cross-linguistic similarity. The aim of the current study was to investigate whether cognate facilitation can also be observed in bilingual children's sentence reading. To answer this question, a group of Frisian-Dutch bilingual children (N = 37) aged 9-12 years completed a reading task in both their languages. All children had Dutch as their dominant reading language, but most of them spoke mainly Frisian at home. Identical cognates (e.g., Dutch-Frisian boek-boek 'book'), non-identical cognates (e.g., beam-boom 'tree'), and non-cognates (e.g., beppe-oma 'grandmother') were presented in sentence context, and eye movements were recorded. The results showed a non-gradual cognate facilitation effect in Frisian: identical cognates were read faster than non-identical cognates and non-cognates. In Dutch, no cognate facilitation effect could be observed. This suggests that bilingual children use their dominant reading language while reading in their non-dominant one, but not vice versa.

Underspecification in toddlers' and adults' lexical representations

Recent research has shown that toddlers' lexical representations are phonologically detailed, quantitatively much like those of adults. Studies in this article explore whether toddlers' and adults' lexical representations are qualitatively similar. Psycholinguistic claims (Lahiri & Marslen-Wilson, 1991; Lahiri & Reetz, 2002, 2010) based on underspecification (Kiparsky, 1982 et seq.) predict asymmetrical judgments in lexical processing tasks; these have been supported in some psycholinguistic research showing that participants are more sensitive to noncoronal-to-coronal (pop → top) than to coronal-to-noncoronal (top → pop) changes or mispronunciations. Three experiments using on-line visual world procedures showed that 19-month-olds and adults displayed sensitivities to both noncoronal-to-coronal and coronal-to-noncoronal mispronunciations of familiar words. No hints of any asymmetries were observed for either age group. There thus appears to be considerable developmental continuity in the nature of early and mature lexical representations. Discrepancies between the current findings and those of previous studies appear to be due to methodological differences that cast doubt on the validity of claims of psycholinguistic support for lexical underspecification.

Parafoveal processing of phonology and semantics during the reading of Korean sentences

The present study sets out to address two fundamental questions in the reading of continuous texts: Whether semantic and phonological information from upcoming words can be accessed during natural reading. In the present study we investigated parafoveal processing during the reading of Korean sentences, manipulating semantic and phonological information from parafoveal preview words. In addition to the first evidence for a semantic preview effect in Korean, we found that Korean readers have stronger and more long-lasting phonological than semantic activation from parafoveal words in second-pass reading. The present study provides an example that human mind can flexibly adjust processing priority to different types of information based on the linguistic environment.

The Changing Role of Phonology in Reading Development

Processing of both a word's orthography (its printed form) and phonology (its associated speech sounds) are critical for lexical identification during reading, both in beginning and skilled readers. Theories of learning to read typically posit a developmental change, from early readers' reliance on phonology to more skilled readers' development of direct orthographic-semantic links. Specifically, in becoming a skilled reader, the extent to which an individual processes phonology during lexical identification is thought to decrease. Recent data from eye movement research suggests, however, that the developmental change in phonological processing is somewhat more nuanced than this. Such studies show that phonology influences lexical identification in beginning and skilled readers in both typically and atypically developing populations. These data indicate, therefore, that the developmental change might better be characterised as a transition from overt decoding to abstract, covert recoding. We do not stop processing phonology as we become more skilled at reading; rather, the nature of that processing changes.

Predicting responsiveness to a sustained reading and spelling intervention in children with dyslexia

The present study aimed to predict responsiveness to a sustained two-phase reading and spelling intervention with a focus on declarative and procedural learning respectively in 122 second-grade Dutch children with dyslexia. We related their responsiveness to intervention to precursor measures (phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming ability, letter knowledge, and verbal working memory) and related word and pseudoword reading and spelling outcomes of the sustained intervention to initial reading and spelling abilities, and first-phase, initial treatment success. Results showed that children with dyslexia improved in reading accuracy and efficiency and in spelling skills during the two phases of the intervention although the gap with typical readers increased. In reading efficiency, rapid automatized naming, and in reading and spelling accuracy phoneme deletion predicted children's responsiveness to intervention. Additionally, children's initial reading abilities at the start of the intervention directly (and indirectly, via initial treatment success, in reading efficiency) predicted posttest outcomes. Responsiveness to intervention in spelling was predicted by phoneme deletion, and spelling at posttest was indirectly, via initial treatment success, predicted by children's initial spelling abilities. Finally, children's initial treatment success directly predicted reading efficiency and spelling outcomes at posttest.

Phonological Ambiguity Detection Outside of Consciousness and Its Defensive Avoidance

Freud proposes that in unconscious processing, logical connections are also (heavily) based upon phonological similarities. Repressed concerns, for example, would also be expressed by way of phonologic ambiguity. In order to investigate a possible unconscious influence of phonological similarity, 31 participants were submitted to a tachistoscopic subliminal priming experiment, with prime and target presented at 1 ms. In the experimental condition, the prime and one of the 2 targets were phonological reversed forms of each other, though graphemically dissimilar (e.g., “nice” and “sign”); in the control condition the targets were pseudo-randomly attributed to primes to which they don't belong. The experimental task was to “blindly” pick the choice most similar to the prime. ERPs were measured with a focus on the N320, which is known to react selectively to phonological mismatch in supraliminal visual word presentations. The N320 amplitude-effects at the electrodes on the midline and at the left of the brain significantly predicted the participants' net behavioral choices more than half a second later, while their subjective experience is one of arbitrariness. Moreover, the social desirability score (SDS) significantly correlates with both the behavioral and the N320 brain responses of the participants. It is proposed that in participants with low SDS the phonological target induces an expected reduction of N320 and this increases their probability to pick this target. In contrast, high defensive participants have a perplexed brain reaction upon the phonological target, with a negatively peaking N320 as compared to control and this leads them to avoid this target more often. Social desirability, which is understood as reflecting defensiveness, might also manifest itself as a defense against the (energy-consuming) ambiguity of language. The specificity of this study is that all of this is happening totally out of awareness and at the level of very elementary linguistic distinctions.

EPS mid-career prize lecture 2017: Writing systems, reading, and language

Skilled reading reflects an accumulation of experience with written language. Written language is typically viewed as an expression of spoken language, and this perspective has motivated approaches to understanding reading and reading acquisition. However, in this article, I develop the proposal that written language has diverged from spoken language in important ways that maximise the transmission of meaningful information, and that this divergence has been central to the development of rapid, skilled reading. I use English as an example to show that weaknesses in the relationship between spelling and sound can give rise to strong regularities between spelling and meaning that are critical for the rapid analysis of printed words. I conclude by arguing that the nature of the reading system is a reflection of the writing system and that a deep understanding of reading can be obtained only through a deep understanding of written language.

A Test Battery for Inner Speech Functions

Objective

Inner speech, or the ability to talk to yourself in your head, is one of the most ubiquitous phenomena of everyday experience. Recent years have seen growing interest in the role and function of inner speech in various typical and cognitively impaired populations. Although people vary in their ability to produce inner speech, there is currently no test battery which can be used to evaluate people's inner speech ability. Here we developed a test battery which can be used to evaluate individual differences in the ability to access the auditory word form internally.

Methods

We developed and standardized five tests: rhyme judgment of pictures and written words, homophone judgment of written words and non-words, and judgment of lexical stress of written words. The tasks were administered to adult healthy native British English speakers (age range 20-72, n = 28-97, varies between tests).

Results

In all tests, some items were excluded based on low success rates among participants, or documented regional variability in accent. Level of education, but not age, correlated with task performance for some of the tasks, and there were no gender difference in performance.

Conclusion

A process of standardization resulted in a battery of tests which can be used to assess natural variability of inner speech abilities among English speaking adults.

Hemispheric processing of lexical information in Chinese character recognition and its relationship to reading performance

Hemispheric predominance has been well documented in the visual perception of alphabetic words. However, the hemispheric processing of lexical information in Chinese character recognition and its relationship to reading performance are far from clear. In the divided visual field paradigm, participants were required to judge the orthography, phonology, or semantics of Chinese characters, which were presented randomly in the left or right visual field. The results showed a right visual field/left hemispheric superiority in the phonological judgment task, but no hemispheric advantage in the orthographic or semantic task was found. In addition, reaction times in the right visual field for phonological and semantic tasks were significantly correlated with the reading test score. These results suggest that both hemispheres involved in the orthographic and semantic processing of Chinese characters, and that the left lateralized phonological processing is important for Chinese fluent reading.

Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition From Novice to Expert

There is intense public interest in questions surrounding how children learn to read and how they can best be taught. Research in psychological science has provided answers to many of these questions but, somewhat surprisingly, this research has been slow to make inroads into educational policy and practice. Instead, the field has been plagued by decades of "reading wars." Even now, there remains a wide gap between the state of research knowledge about learning to read and the state of public understanding. The aim of this article is to fill this gap. We present a comprehensive tutorial review of the science of learning to read, spanning from children's earliest alphabetic skills through to the fluent word recognition and skilled text comprehension characteristic of expert readers. We explain why phonics instruction is so central to learning in a writing system such as English. But we also move beyond phonics, reviewing research on what else children need to learn to become expert readers and considering how this might be translated into effective classroom practice. We call for an end to the reading wars and recommend an agenda for instruction and research in reading acquisition that is balanced, developmentally informed, and based on a deep understanding of how language and writing systems work.

Survival analyses reveal how early phonological processing affects eye movements during reading

Numerous studies have provided evidence that readers generate phonological codes while reading. However, a central question in much of this research has been how early these codes are generated. Answering this question has implications for the roles that phonological coding might play for skilled readers, especially whether phonological codes affect the identification of most words, which can only be the case if these codes are generated rapidly. To investigate the time course of phonological coding during silent reading, the present series of experiments examined survival analyses of first-fixation durations on phonologically related (homophones, pseudohomophones) and orthographic control (orthographically matched words and nonwords) stimuli that were either embedded in sentences in place of correct targets (Experiments 1 and 2) or presented as parafoveal previews for correct targets using the boundary paradigm (Experiments 3 and 4). Survival analyses revealed a discernible difference between processing the phonologically related versus the orthographic control items by as early as 160 ms from the start of fixation on average (160-173 ms across experiments). Because only approximately 18% of first fixation durations were shorter than these mean estimates and follow-up tests revealed that earlier divergence point estimates were associated with shorter gaze durations (e.g., more rapid word identification), results suggest that skilled readers rapidly generate phonological codes during normal, silent reading and that these codes may affect the identification of most words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

From sound to meaning: Phonology-to-Semantics mapping in visual word recognition

In the present study, the role of phonological information in visual word recognition is investigated by adopting a large-scale data-driven approach that exploits a new consistency measure based on distributional semantics methods. A recent study by Marelli, Amenta, and Crepaldi (2015) showed that the consistency between an orthographic string and the meanings to which it is associated in a large corpus is a relevant predictor in lexical decision experiments. Exploiting irregular mappings between orthography and phonology in English, we were able to compute a phonology-to-semantics consistency measure that dissociates from its orthographic counterpart and tested both measures on lexical decision data taken from the British Lexicon Project (Keuleers et al., 2012). Results showed that both orthography and phonology are activated during visual word recognition. However, their contribution is crucially determined by the extent to which they are informative of the word semantics, and phonology plays a crucial role in accessing word meaning.

Orthographic effects in spoken word recognition: Evidence from Chinese

Extensive evidence from alphabetic languages demonstrates a role of orthography in the processing of spoken words. Because alphabetic systems explicitly code speech sounds, such effects are perhaps not surprising. However, it is less clear whether orthographic codes are involuntarily accessed from spoken words in languages with non-alphabetic systems, in which the sound-spelling correspondence is largely arbitrary. We investigated the role of orthography via a semantic relatedness judgment task: native Mandarin speakers judged whether or not spoken word pairs were related in meaning. Word pairs were either semantically related, orthographically related, or unrelated. Results showed that relatedness judgments were made faster for word pairs that were semantically related than for unrelated word pairs. Critically, orthographic overlap on semantically unrelated word pairs induced a significant increase in response latencies. These findings indicate that orthographic information is involuntarily accessed in spoken-word recognition, even in a non-alphabetic language such as Chinese.

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.

Phonemic feature involvement in lexical access in grades 3 and 5: Evidence from visual and auditory lexical decision tasks

Numerous studies have evidenced the involvement of the phonological code during visual word recognition not only in skilled adult readers but also in child readers. Moreover, in skilled adult readers, visual word processing has been shown to be sensitive to phonetic details such as phonemic features (e.g., manner of articulation, place of articulation, voicing and nasality in French) which are typically involved in phonological lexicon access during speech processing. In contrast, it is not known whether and when visual word recognition is affected by phonemic features during learning to read. The present study investigates this issue in third and fifth graders. A lexical decision task was performed in visual and auditory modalities. Targets were French words (e.g., piano [piano]) and pseudowords created from target words. Mismatching was on the first phoneme. There were one-feature phoneme mismatch pseudowords (e.g., tiano) and multiple-feature phoneme mismatch pseudowords (e.g., liano). The pseudowords were used as a marker of the sensitivity to phonemic features in phonological lexicon access. Phonemic feature effects were found in visual and auditory lexical decision tasks in both grades, indicating that phonological lexicon access involves phonemic features in print processing as in speech processing. In contrast, the absence of difference between both grades seems to indicate that this effect is independent of age or, more precisely, of phonological development and reading performance.

Orthographic processing: A ‘mid-level’ vision of reading: The 44th Sir Frederic Bartlett Lecture

I will describe how orthographic processing acts as a central interface between visual and linguistic processing during reading, and as such can be considered to be the ‘mid-level vision’ of reading research. In order to make this case, I first summarize the evidence in favour of letter-based word recognition before examining work investigating how orthographic similarities among words influence single word reading. I describe how evidence gradually accumulated against traditional measures of orthographic similarity and the associated theories of orthographic processing, forcing a reconsideration of how letter-position information is represented by skilled readers. Then, I present the theoretical framework that was developed to explain these findings, with a focus on the distinction between location-specific and location-invariant orthographic representations. Finally, I describe work extending this theoretical framework in two main directions: first, to the realm of reading development, with the aim to specify the key changes in the processing of letters and letter strings that accompany successful learning to read, and second, to the realm of sentence reading, in order to specify how orthographic information can be processed across several words in parallel, and how skilled readers keep track of which letters belong to which words.

The Homophone Effect in Semantic access Tasks using Kanji Words: Its Relation to the Articulatory Suppression Effect

The present study examined whether articulatory suppression influences homophone effects in semantic access tasks using Japanese kanji words. In Experiment 1, participants were required to decide whether visually presented word pairs were synonyms. This experiment replicated the homophone effect observed in previous research that showed more false positive errors in response to nonsynonym homophone pairs than to controls. The present study found that this homophone effect was also obtained under an articulatory suppression condition. In Experiment 2, participants performed a semantic decision task, in which they had to judge whether a visually presented target word was an exemplar of a definition that was shown immediately before presentation of the target word. The homophone effect observed in previous studies was replicated—that is, longer response times and more false positive errors were associated with homophones of correct exemplars than with nonhomophone control words. This homophone effect was also obtained under an articulatory suppression conditions. These results suggest that the phonological processing that produces the homophone effects in semantic access tasks using Japanese kanji words does not include articulatory mechanisms.

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.

Can Lextale-Esp discriminate between groups of highly proficient Catalan-Spanish bilinguals with different language dominances?

Researchers have recently introduced various LexTALE-type word recognition tests in order to assess vocabulary size in a second language (L2) mastered by participants. These tests correlate well with other measures of language proficiency in unbalanced bilinguals whose second language ability is well below the level of their native language. In the present study, we investigated whether LexTALE-type tests also discriminate at the high end of the proficiency range. In several regions of Spain, people speak both the regional language (e.g., Catalan or Basque) and Spanish to very high degrees. Still, because of their living circumstances, some consider themselves as either Spanish-dominant or regional-language dominant. We showed that these two groups perform differently on the recently published Spanish Lextale-Esp: The Spanish-dominant group had significantly higher scores than the Catalan-dominant group. We also showed that the noncognate words of the test have the highest discrimination power. This indicates that the existing Lextale-Esp can be used to estimate proficiency differences in highly proficient bilinguals with Spanish as an L2, and that a more sensitive test could be built by replacing the cognates.

Sweet-cheeks vs. pea-brain: embodiment, valence, and task all influence the emotional salience of language

Previous research has found that more embodied insults (e.g. numbskull) are identified faster and more accurately than less embodied insults (e.g. idiot). The linguistic processing of embodied compliments has not been well explored. In the present study, participants completed two tasks where they identified insults and compliments, respectively. Half of the stimuli were more embodied than the other half. We examined the late positive potential (LPP) component of event-related potentials in early (400-500 ms), middle (500-600 ms), and late (600-700 ms) time windows. Increased embodiment resulted in improved response accuracy to compliments in both tasks, whereas it only improved accuracy for insults in the compliment detection task. More embodied stimuli elicited a larger LPP than less embodied stimuli in the early time window. Insults generated a larger LPP in the late time window in the insult task; compliments generated a larger LPP in the early window in the compliment task. These results indicate that electrophysiological correlates of emotional language perception are sensitive to both top-down and bottom-up processes.

The Word Composite Effect Depends on Abstract Lexical Representations But Not Surface Features Like Case and Font

Prior studies have shown that words show a composite effect: When readers perform a same-different matching task on a target-part of a word, performance is affected by the irrelevant part, whose influence is severely reduced when the two parts are misaligned. However, the locus of this word composite effect is largely unknown. To enlighten it, in two experiments, Portuguese readers performed the composite task on letter strings: in Experiment 1, in written words varying in surface features (between-participants: courier, notera, alternating-cAsE), and in Experiment 2 in pseudowords. The word composite effect, signaled by a significant interaction between alignment of the two word parts and congruence between parts was found in the three conditions of Experiment 1, being unaffected by NoVeLtY of the configuration or by handwritten form. This effect seems to have a lexical locus, given that in Experiment 2 only the main effect of congruence between parts was significant and was not modulated by alignment. Indeed, the cross-experiment analysis showed that words presented stronger congruence effects than pseudowords only in the aligned condition, because when misaligned the whole lexical item configuration was disrupted. Therefore, the word composite effect strongly depends on abstract lexical representations, as it is unaffected by surface features and is specific to lexical items.

A Connectionist Modeling Approach to Word Recognition and Dyslexia

Word recognition plays an essential role in learning to read, skilled reading, and dyslexia. The goal of the research I describe is to develop a theory of word recognition that is realized as a connectionist simulation model. Experience with a first-generation model suggests that the approach can reveal general principles underlying word recognition and its impairments. Although computational modeling introduces new problems of method and interpretation, it contributes in an essential way to understanding reading and other aspects of cognition.