0000000000126193
AUTHOR
Reem Abu Mallouh
The G428A Nonsense Mutation in FUT2 Provides Strong but Not Absolute Protection against Symptomatic GII.4 Norovirus Infection
In November 2004, 116 individuals in an elderly nursing home in El Grao de Castellón, Spain were symptomatically infected with genogroup II.4 (GII.4) norovirus. The global attack rate was 54.2%. Genotyping of 34 symptomatic individuals regarding the FUT2 gene revealed that one patient was, surprisingly, a non-secretor, hence indicating secretor-independent infection. Lewis genotyping revealed that Lewis-positive and negative individuals were susceptible to symptomatic norovirus infection indicating that Lewis status did not predict susceptibility. Saliva based ELISA assays were used to determine binding of the outbreak virus to saliva samples. Saliva from a secretor-negative individual boun…
Masked priming effects are modulated by expertise in the script.
In a recent study using a masked priming same–different matching task, García-Orza, Perea, and Muñoz (2010) found a transposition priming effect for letter strings, digit strings, and symbol strings, but not for strings of pseudoletters (i.e., [Formula: see text] produced similar response times to the control pair [Formula: see text]). They argued that the mechanism responsible for position coding in masked priming is not operative with those “objects” whose identity cannot be attained rapidly. To assess this hypothesis, Experiment 1 examined masked priming effects in Arabic for native speakers of Arabic, whereas participants in Experiments 2 and 3 were lower intermediate learners of Arabi…
Location of navigation menus in websites: an experimental study with Arabic users
Published online: 31 October 2015 While Arabic users represent by far the fastest growing language population on the Internet, research about how the peculiarities of Arabic language may shape users’ web interactions is still scarce. The preferences of Arabic users for menu location in websites have been studied. Two competing arguments have been proposed regarding the best location of menus in websites: conventional design (navigation menu should be placed on that side where users expect it based on previous experience) and reading direction (navigation menu should be placed on that side where readers are used to start off reading, so that the navigation menu is likely to be attended first…
In Defense of Position Uncertainty
The authors comments on the article "Orthographic coding in illiterates," by J. A. Dunabeitia, et al. There is a high degree of flexibility in letter-position coding during visual word recognition and reading. This phenomenon is explained based on the presence of perceptual noise in the information used for locating the positions of objects, namely, letters, across space.
Do Diacritical Marks Play a Role at the Early Stages of Word Recognition in Arabic?
Published: 22 August 2016 A crucial question in the domain of visual word recognition is whether letter similarity plays a role in the early stages of visual word processing. Here we focused on Arabic because in this language there are various groups of letters that share the same basic shape and only differ in the number/location of diacritical points. We conducted a masked priming lexical decision experiment in which a target word was preceded by: (i) an identity prime; (ii) a prime in which the critical letter was replaced by a letter with the same shape that differed in the number of diacritics (e.g., ); or (iii) a prime in which the critical letter was replaced by a letter with differe…
Neural Correlates of Visual versus Abstract Letter Processing in Roman and Arabic Scripts
In alphabetic orthographies, letter identification is a critical process during the recognition of visually presented words. In the present experiment, we examined whether and when visual form influences letter processing in two very distinct alphabets (Roman and Arabic). Disentangling visual versus abstract letter representations was possible because letters in the Roman alphabet may look visually similar/dissimilar in lowercase and uppercase forms (e.g., c-C vs. r-R) and letters in the Arabic alphabet may look visually similar/dissimilar, depending on their position within a word (e.g., [Formula: see text] - [Formula: see text] vs. [Formula: see text] - [Formula: see text]). We employed a…
Early access to abstract representations in developing readers: evidence from masked priming
A commonly shared assumption in the field of visual-word recognition is that retinotopic representations are rapidly converted into abstract representations. Here we examine the role of visual form vs. abstract representations during the early stages of word processing - as measured by masked priming - in young children (3rd and 6th Graders) and adult readers. To maximize the chances of detecting an effect of visual form, we employed a language with a very intricate orthography, Arabic. If visual form plays a role in the early stages of processing, greater benefit would be expected from related primes that have the same visual form (in terms of the ligation pattern between a word's letters)…
Does the Visual Attention Span Play a Role in Reading in Arabic?
It is unclear whether the association between the visual attention (VA) span and reading differs across languages. Here we studied this relationship in Arabic, where the use of specific reading strategies depends on the amount of diacritics on words: reading vowelized and nonvowelized Arabic scripts favor sublexical and lexical strategies, respectively. We hypothesized that the size of the VA span and its association to reading would differ depending on individual �script preferences.� We compared children who were more proficient in reading fully vowelized Arabic than nonvowelized Arabic (VOW) to children for whom the opposite was true (NOVOW). NOVOW children showed a crowding effect in th…
Does visual letter similarity modulate masked form priming in young readers of Arabic?
Available online 19 January 2018 Supplementary data associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jecp.2017.12.004. Supplementary data associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jecp.2017.12.004. We carried out a masked priming lexical decision experiment to study whether visual letter similarity plays a role during the initial phases of word processing in young readers of Arabic (fifth graders). Arabic is ideally suited to test these effects because most Arabic letters share their basic shape with at least one other letter and differ only in the number/position of diacritical points (e.g.…
Are root letters compulsory for lexical access in Semitic languages? The case of masked form-priming in Arabic.
Do Semitic and Indo-European languages differ at a qualitative level? Recently, it has been claimed that lexical space in Semitic languages (e.g., Hebrew, Arabic) is mainly determined by morphological constraints, while lexical space in Indo-European languages is mainly determined by orthographic constraints (Frost, Kugler, Deutsch, & Forster, 2005). One of the key findings supporting the qualitative difference between Semitic and Indo-European languages is the absence of masked form priming in Hebrew/Arabic with productive words. Here we examined whether masked form priming occurs in Arabic words when one of the letters from the productive root is replaced in the prime stimulus by another …