Detección temprana de la dislexia mediante el reconocimiento de voces

Un aspecto clave para la intervención educativa específica es la detección temprana de niños con riesgo de dislexia. En este trabajo presentamos una sencilla tarea conductual de asociación de voces (modalidad auditiva) con avatares (modalidad visual), en la que las personas con dislexia muestran un rendimiento más bajo que las personas normo-lectoras. Dicho patrón de datos ocurre no solamente con lectores adultos, sino también con niños. Por tanto, esta tarea de integración multisensorial puede ser empleada como un marcador de la dislexia, en conjunto con otras tareas (v.g., conocimiento fonológico).

The time course of orthography and phonology: ERP correlates of masked priming effects in Spanish

Abstract One key issue for computational models of visual-word recognition is the time course of orthographic and phonological information during reading. Previous research, using both behavioral and event related brain potential (ERP) measures, has shown that orthographic codes are activated very early but that phonological activation starts to occur immediately afterward. Here we report an ERP masked priming experiment in Spanish that investigates this issue further by using very strict control conditions. The critical phonological comparison was between two pairs of primes having the same orthographic similarity to the target words but differing in phonological similarity (e.g., conal-CA…

Buscando las claves de la lectura en personas sordas

En este trabajo examinamos los procesos de reconocimiento visual de palabras en una población que muestra generalmente un bajo nivel lector: las personas sordas prelocutivas. Si bien investigaciones recientes han mostrado que las personas sordas hacen uso efectivo de la información proveniente de la forma visual de las palabras, no lo hacen de su sonido. Por tanto, en la intervención educativa, sería conveniente que los profesionales que trabajaran con personas sordas emplearan procedimientos que les permitieran desarrollar una correspondencia más estable entre las letras y sus sonidos.

Does "whole-word shape" play a role in visual word recognition?

To analyze the impact of outline shape on visual word recognition, the visual pattern of the stimuli can be distorted by size alternation. Contrary to the predictions of models that rely on outline shape (Allen, Wallace, & Weber, 1995), the effect of size alternationwas greater for low-frequency words than for high-frequency words in a lexical decision task (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2, the effect of case type (lowercase vs. UPPERCASE) occurred for low-frequency words, but not for high-frequency words. The effect of neighborhood size was remarkably similar in the two experiments. The results can be readily explained in the framework of a resonance model (Grossberg & Stone, 1986), in whic…

The impact of visual cues during visual word recognition in deaf readers: An ERP study

Abstract Although evidence is still scarce, recent research suggests key differences in how deaf and hearing readers use visual information during visual word recognition. Here we compared the time course of lexical access in deaf and hearing readers of similar reading ability. We also investigated whether one visual property of words, the outline-shape, modulates visual word recognition differently in both groups. We recorded the EEG signal of twenty deaf and twenty hearing readers while they performed a lexical decision task. In addition to the effect of lexicality, we assessed the impact of outline-shape by contrasting responses to pseudowords with an outline-shape that was consistent (e…

ERP correlates of masked affective priming with emoticons

Emoticons seem to enrich computer-mediated communication by improving enjoyment, perceived richness and usefulness of information (Huang, Yen, & Zhang, 2008). Despite their extensive use over the last decades, the way emoticons affect subsequent emotional/cognitive processing is not fully understood. Here we conducted a masked priming experiment that explored the time course of the masked affective priming effect while recording event-related potentials. Type of prime (emoticon vs. word) and prime valence (positive vs. negative) were manipulated to assess their influence in the processing of positive/negative target words. Results showed a masked affective priming effect in early (N2) and l…

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…

Position coding effects in a 2D scenario: the case of musical notation.

How does the cognitive system encode the location of objects in a visual scene? In the past decade, this question has attracted much attention in the field of visual-word recognition (e.g., "jugde" is perceptually very close to "judge"). Letter transposition effects have been explained in terms of perceptual uncertainty or shared "open bigrams". In the present study, we focus on note position coding in music reading (i.e., a 2D scenario). The usual way to display music is the staff (i.e., a set of 5 horizontal lines and their resultant 4 spaces). When reading musical notation, it is critical to identify not only each note (temporal duration), but also its pitch (y-axis) and its temporal seq…

IsMilkmana superhero likeBatman? Constituent morphological priming in compound words

In the present study, we examined morphological decomposition of Basque compound words in a series of masked priming lexical decision experiments. In Experiment 1, Basque compound words could be briefly preceded by other compounds that shared either the first or second constituent, or by unrelated noncompound words. Results showed a significant priming effect for words that shared a constituent, independently of its position. In Experiment 2, compound words were preceded by other compound words that shared one of their constituents, but in a different lexeme position (e.g., the first constituent of the compound that acted as a prime was the second constituent of the compound that acted as a…

The processing of consonants and vowels during letter identity and letter position assignment in visual-word recognition: an ERP study.

Abstract Recent research suggests that there is a processing distinction between consonants and vowels in visual-word recognition. Here we conjointly examine the time course of consonants and vowels in processes of letter identity and letter position assignment. Event related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read words and pseudowords in a lexical decision task. The stimuli were displayed under different conditions in a masked priming paradigm with a 50-ms SOA: (i) identity/baseline condition e.g., chocolate-CHOCOLATE); (ii) vowels-delayed condition (e.g., choc l te-CHOCOLATE); (iii) consonants-delayed condition (cho o ate-CHOCOLATE); (iv) consonants-transposed condition (…

Does conal prime CANAL more than cinal? Masked phonological priming effects in Spanish with the lexical decision task.

Evidence for an early involvement of phonology in word identification usually relies on the comparison between a target word preceded by a homophonic prime and an orthographic control (rait-RATE vs. raut-RATE). This comparison rests on the assumption that the two control primes are equally orthographically similar to the target. Here, we tested for phonological effects with a masked priming paradigm in which orthographic similarity between priming conditions was perfectly controlled at the letter level and in which identification of the prime was virtually at chance for both stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) (66 and 50 msec). In the key prime-target pairs, each prime differed from the targ…

On the nature of consonant/vowel differences in letter position coding: Evidence from developing and adult readers

In skilled adult readers, transposed-letter effects (jugde-JUDGE) are greater for consonant than for vowel transpositions. These differences are often attributed to phonological rather than orthographic processing. To examine this issue, we employed a scenario in which phonological involvement varies as a function of reading experience: a masked priming lexical decision task with 50-ms primes in adult and developing readers. Indeed, masked phonological priming at this prime duration has been consistently reported in adults, but not in developing readers (Davis, Castles, & Iakovidis, 1998). Thus, if consonant/vowel asymmetries in letter position coding with adults are due to phonological inf…

Transposed-letter effects: Consonants, vowels and letter frequency

There is now considerable evidence (e.g., Perea & Lupker, 2003a, 2003b) that transposed-letter nonword primes (e.g., jugde for JUDGE) are more effective primes than replacement-letter nonword primes (e.g., jupte for JUDGE). Recently, Perea and Lupker (2004) demonstrated that, in Spanish, this transposed-letter prime advantage exists only when the transposed letters are consonants (C-C transpositions) and not when they are vowels (V-V transpositions). This vowel-consonant difference causes problems even for models that can successfully explain transposed-letter effects (e.g., SOLAR, Davis, 1999). In Experiment 1 in the present paper, we demonstrated a parallel result in a language with a dif…

Do transposed-letter similarity effects occur at a prelexical phonological level?

Nonwords created by transposing two letters (e.g., RELOVUTION) are very effective at activating the lexical representation of their base words (Perea & Lupker, 2004). In the present study, we examined whether the nature of transposed-letter (TL) similarity effects was purely orthographic or whether it could also have a phonological component. Specifically, we examined transposed-letter similarity effects for nonwords created by transposing two nonadjacent letters (e.g., relovución– REVOLUCIÓN) in a masked form priming experiment using the lexical decision task (Experiment 1). The controls were (a) a pseudohomophone of the transposed-letter prime ( relobución– REVOLUCIÓN; note that B an…

Does orthographic processing emerge rapidly after learning a new script?

Epub 2020 Aug 11 Orthographic processing is characterized by location-invariant and location-specific processing (Grainger, 2018): (1) strings of letters are more vulnerable to transposition effects than the strings of symbols in same-different tasks (location-invariant processing); and (2) strings of letters, but not strings of symbols, show an initial position advantage in target-in-string identification tasks (location-specific processing). To examine the emergence of these two markers of orthographic processing, we conducted a same-different task and a target-in-string identification task with two unfamiliar scripts (pre-training experiments). Across six training sessions, participants …

Do Grading Gray Stimuli Help to Encode Letter Position?

Numerous experiments in the past decades recurrently showed that a transposed-letter pseudoword (e.g., JUGDE) is much more wordlike than a replacement-letter control (e.g., JUPTE). Critically, there is an ongoing debate as to whether this effect arises at a perceptual level (e.g., perceptual uncertainty at assigning letter position of an array of visual objects) or at an abstract language-specific level (e.g., via a level of “open bigrams” between the letter and word levels). Here, we designed an experiment to test the limits of perceptual accounts of letter position coding. The stimuli in a lexical decision task were presented either with a homogeneous letter intensity or with a graded gra…

Vocabulary teaching strategies and conceptual representations of words in L2 in children: evidence with novice learners.

Abstract A controversial issue in bilingual research is whether in the early stages of L2 learning, access to the conceptual system involves mediation of L1 lexical representations [Kroll, J. F., & Stewart, E. (1994). Category interference in translation and picture naming: Evidence for asymmetric connections between bilingual memory representations. Journal of Memory and Language, 33, 149–174] or a direct route from the L2 word [Altarriba, J., & Mathis, K. M. (1997). Conceptual and lexical development in second language acquisition. Journal of Memory and Language, 36, 550–568; Finkbeiner, M., & Nicol, J. (2003). Semantic category effects in second language word learning. Applied Psycholing…

Reading development in agglutinative languages: Evidence from beginning, intermediate, and adult Basque readers

Do typological properties of language, such as agglutination (i.e., the morphological process of adding affixes to the lexeme of a word), have an impact on the development of visual word recognition? To answer this question, we carried out an experiment in which beginning, intermediate, and adult Basque readers (n =3 2 each, average age = 7, 11, and 22 years, respectively) needed to read correctly versus incorrectly inflected words embedded in sentences. Half of the targets contained high-frequency stems, and the other half contained low-frequency stems. To each stem, four inflections of different lengths were attached (-a ,- ari ,- aren, and -arentzat, i.e., inflectional sequences). To tes…

Sequential effects in the lexical decision task: the role of the item frequency of the previous trial.

Two lexical decision experiments were conducted to determine whether there is a specific, localized influence of the item frequency of consecutive trials (i.e., first-order sequential effects) when the trials are not related to each other. Both low-frequency words and nonwords were influenced by the frequency of the precursor word (Experiment 1). In contrast, high-frequency words showed little sensitivity to the frequency of the precursor word (Experiment 2), although they showed longer reaction times for word trials preceded by a nonword trial. The presence of sequential effects in the lexical decision task suggests that participants shift their response criteria on a trial-by-trial basis.

READING WORDS, NUMB3R5 and $YMßOL$

Words in alphabetic languages are processed via their constituents [1]. To recognize a printed word, we need to process the identity and position of its letters, hence distinguishing between cat and fat, or dog and god, but not between tABLe and TabLE, or and . Dehaene and colleagues [2] proposed a neuronal model with feed-forward connections only, according to which the brain decodes words through a hierarchy of local combination detectors in the occipito–infero–temporal pathway sensitive to increasingly larger fragments of words.

Are coffee and toffee served in a cup? Ortho-phonologically mediated associative priming.

We report three masked associative priming experiments with the lexical decision task that explore whether the initial activation flow of a visually presented word activates the semantic representations of that word's orthographic/phonological neighbours. The predictions of cascades and serial/modular models of lexical processing differ widely in this respect. Using a masked priming paradigm (stimulus onset asynchrony, SOA = 50 ms), words preceded by ortho-phonologically mediated associated “neighbours” ( oveja–MIEL, the Spanish for sheep–HONEY; note that oveja is a phonological neighbour of abeja, the Spanish for bee) were recognized more rapidly than words preceded by an unrelated word p…

Do serifs provide an advantage in the recognition of written words?

A neglected issue in the literature on visual-word recognition is the careful examination of parameters such as font, size, or interletter/interword spacing on reading times. Here we analysed whether serifs (i.e., the small features at the end of strokes) play a role in lexical access. Traditionally, serif fonts have been considered easier to read than sans serif fonts, but prior empirical evidence is scarce and inconclusive. Here we conducted a lexical decision experiment (i.e., a word/nonword discrimination task) in which we compared words from the same family (Lucida) either with a serif font or with a sans serif font—in both a block list and a mixed list. Results showed a small, but sig…

Eye movements when reading sentences with handwritten words.

The examination of how we read handwritten words (i.e., the original form of writing) has typically been disregarded in the literature on reading. Previous research using word recognition tasks has shown that lexical effects (e.g., the word-frequency effect) are magnified when reading difficult handwritten words. To examine this issue in a more ecological scenario, we registered the participants’ eye movements when reading handwritten sentences that varied in the degree of legibility (i.e., sentences composed of words in easy vs. difficult handwritten style). For comparison purposes, we included a condition with printed sentences. Results showed a larger reading cost for sentences with dif…

The effects of associative and semantic priming in the lexical decision task.

Four lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine under which conditions automatic semantic priming effects can be obtained. Experiments 1 and 2 analyzed associative/semantic effects at several very short stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs), whereas Experiments 3 and 4 used a single-presentation paradigm at two response-stimulus intervals (RSIs). Experiment 1 tested associatively related pairs from three semantic categories (synonyms, antonyms, and category coordinates). The results showed reliable associative priming effects at all SOAs. In addition, the correlation between associative strength and magnitude of priming was significant only at the shortest SOA (66 ms). When prime-t…

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.

sj-docx-1-qjp-10.1177_17470218211044694 – Supplemental material for Does omitting the accent mark in a word affect sentence reading? Evidence from Spanish

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-qjp-10.1177_17470218211044694 for Does omitting the accent mark in a word affect sentence reading? Evidence from Spanish by Ana Marcet and Manuel Perea in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

The effects of reward and frustration in patients with bipolar disorder: Evidence from a computerized task with non-contingent feedback.

Abstract Background: Bipolar disorder (BD) is characterized by mood changes that implies alterations in reward sensitivity and frustration tolerance. This study examined the effects of monetary reward and frustration on attentional performance and on affective experience across mood states in BD. Methods: An Affective Posner Task in which the nature of contingencies are divided in the three successive blocks (baseline condition, monetary reward and non-contingent feedback) was applied to BD individuals in their different episodes: mania (n = 30), depression (n = 30), and euthymia (n =  30) as well as to a group of healthy controls (n = 30). Results: Monetary reward improved performance (in …

Are transposition effects specific to letters?

Recent research has consistently shown that pseudowords created by transposing two letters are perceptually similar to their corresponding base words (e.g., jugde–judge). In the framework of the overlap model (Gomez, Ratcliff, & Perea, 2008), this effect is due to a noisy process in the localization of the “objects” (e.g., letters, kana syllables). In the present study, we examine whether this effect is specific to letter strings or whether it also occurs with other “objects” (namely, digits, symbols, and pseudoletters). To that end, we conducted a series of five masked priming experiments using the same–different task. Results showed robust effects of transposition for all objects, ex…

Doesdarknesslead tohappiness? Masked suffix priming effects

Masked affix priming effects have usually been obtained for words sharing the initial affix (e.g., re action- RE FORM). However, prior evidence on masked suffix priming effects (e.g., bak er -WALK ER ) is inconclusive. In the present series of masked priming lexical decision experiments, a target word was briefly preceded by a morphologically or orthographically related prime, or by an unrelated prime. In Experiment 1, the prime words in the suffix priming condition were formed by their suffixes (e.g., er -WALK ER ). In Experiment 2, the primes included the suffix inserted in a nonsense symbol string (e.g., %%%% er -WALK ER ). In Experiment 3, the primes were formed by a real word that shar…

Eye movements when reading words with $YMβOL$ and NUM83R5: There is a cost

Recent evidence from masked priming experiments has revealed that readers regularize letter-like symbols and letter-like numbers into their corresponding base letters with minimal processing cost. However, one open question is whether the same pattern occurs when these items are presented during normal silent reading. In the present study, we respond to this question in an eye-movement experiment that included sentences with words that had symbols and numbers as letters, as in “YESTERDAY I SAW THE SECRE74RY WORKING VERY HARD”. Results revealed that there is a greater reading cost associated with letter-by-number replacements than with letter-by-symbol replacements, especially when the repla…

On the role of the upper part of words in lexical access: evidence with masked priming.

More than 100 years ago, Huey (1908) indicated that the upper part of words was more relevant for perception than the lower part. Here we examined whether mutilated words, in their upper/lower portions (e.g., , , , ), can automatically access their word units in the mental lexicon. To that end, we conducted four masked repetition priming experiments with the lexical decision task. Results showed that mutilated primes produced a sizeable masked repetition priming effect. Furthermore, the magnitude of the masked repetition priming effect was greater when the upper part of the primes was preserved than when the lower portion was preserved –this was the case not only when the mutilated words we…

Are Vowels and Consonants Processed Differently? Event-related Potential Evidence with a Delayed Letter Paradigm

Abstract To investigate the neural bases of consonant and vowel processing, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read words and pseudowords in a lexical decision task. The stimuli were displayed in three different conditions: (i) simultaneous presentation of all letters (baseline condition); (ii) presentation of all letters, except that two internal consonants were delayed for 50 msec (consonants-delayed condition); and (iii) presentation of all letters, except that two internal vowels were delayed for 50 msec (vowels-delayed condition). The behavioral results showed that, for words, response times in the consonants-delayed condition were longer than in the vowel…

Blocking by word frequency and neighborhood density in visual word recognition: A task-specific response criteria account

International audience; Effects of blocking words by frequency class (high vs. low) and neighborhood density (high vs. low) were examined in two experiments using progressive demasking and lexical decision tasks. The aim was to examine the predictions of a task-specific response criteria account of list-blocking effects. Distinct patterns of blocking effects were obtained in the two tasks. In the progressive demasking task, a pure-list disadvantage was obtained to low frequency-high density words, whereas high frequency-low density produced a trend toward a pure-list advantage. In lexical decision, high-frequency words showed a pure-list advantage that was strongest in high-density words, w…

The frequency effect for pseudowords in the lexical decision task

Four experiments were designed to investigate whether the frequency of words used to create pseudowords plays an important role in lexical decision. Computational models of the lexical decision task (e.g., the dual route cascaded model and the multiple read-out model) predict that latencies to low-frequency pseudowords should be faster than latencies to high-frequency pseudowords. Consistent with this prediction, results showed that when the pseudowords were created by replacing one internal letter of the base word (Experiments 1 and 3), high-frequency pseudowords yielded slower latencies than low-frequency pseudowords. However, this effect occurred only in the leading edge of the response …

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…

Corrigendum to “Is the go/no-go lexical decision task preferable to the yes/no task with developing readers?” [J. Exp. Child Psychol. 110 (2011) 125–132]

On the advantages of word-frequency and contextual diversity measures extracted from subtitles: the case of Portuguese

Accepted manuscript. Epub ahead of print, 29 Sep. 2014.

BuscaPalabras: a program for deriving orthographic and phonological neighborhood statistics and other psycholinguistic indices in Spanish.

This article describes a Windows program that enables users to obtain a broad range of statistics concerning the properties of word and nonword stimuli in Spanish, including word frequency, syllable frequency, bigram and biphone frequency, orthographic similarity, orthographic and phonological structure, concreteness, familiarity, imageability, valence, arousal, and age-of-acquisition measures. It is designed for use by researchers in psycholinguistics, particularly those concerned with recognition of isolated words. The program computes measures of orthographic similarity online, with respect to either a default vocabulary of 31,491 Spanish words or a vocabulary specified by the user. In a…

Modulation of attention by socio-emotional scenes in children with autism spectrum disorder

Background: Abnormal attentional processes to socially relevant information may underlie social impairment in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). To examine how these processes are modulated by the emotional salience of the stimuli, we studied the attentional biases to social scenes (happy, sad, and threatening) in ASD children. Method: An emotional dot-probe task was applied to children (from 6 to 12 years old) with Autism Spectrum Disorder without additional language and/or intellectual impairments (ASD; n=25) and age/sex-matched controls (n=25). Results: ASD children showed an attentional bias toward threatening scenes while typically developing children tended to direct their attention towa…

Perceptual uncertainty is a property of the cognitive system

AbstractWe qualify Frost's proposals regarding letter-position coding in visual word recognition and the universal model of reading. First, we show that perceptual uncertainty regarding letter position is not tied to European languages – instead it is a general property of the cognitive system. Second, we argue that a universal model of reading should incorporate a developmental view of the reading process.

Does Top-Down Feedback Modulate the Encoding of Orthographic Representations During Visual-Word Recognition?

Abstract. In masked priming lexical decision experiments, there is a matched-case identity advantage for nonwords, but not for words (e.g., ERTAR-ERTAR <  ertar-ERTAR; ALTAR-ALTAR = altar-ALTAR). This dissociation has been interpreted in terms of feedback from higher levels of processing during orthographic encoding. Here, we examined whether a matched-case identity advantage also occurs for words when top-down feedback is minimized. We employed a task that taps prelexical orthographic processes: the masked prime same-different task. For “same” trials, results showed faster response times for targets when preceded by a briefly presented matched-case identity prime than when preceded by …

Unveiling the boost in the sandwich priming technique.

The masked priming technique (which compares #####-house-HOUSE vs. #####-fight-HOUSE) is the gold-standard tool to examine the initial moments of word processing. Lupker and Davis showed that adding a pre-prime identical to the target produced greater priming effects in the sandwich technique (which compares #####-HOUSE-house-HOUSE vs #####-HOUSE-fight-HOUSE). While there is consensus that the sandwich technique magnifies the size of priming effects relative to the standard procedure, the mechanisms underlying this boost are not well understood (i.e., does it reflect quantitative or qualitative changes?). To fully characterise the sandwich technique, we compared the sandwich and standard t…

The effects of length and transposed-letter similarity in lexical decision: evidence with beginning, intermediate, and adult readers.

Do length and transposed-letter effects reflect developmental changes on reading acquisition in a transparent orthography? Can computational models of visual word recognition accommodate these changes? To answer these questions, we carried out a masked priming lexical decision experiment with Spanish beginning, intermediate, and adult readers (N=36, 44, and 39; average age: 7, 11, and 22 years, respectively). Target words were either short or long (6.5 vs. 8.5 letters), and transposed-letter primes were formed by the transposition of two letters (e.g. aminal-ANIMAL) or by the substitution of two letters (orthographic control: arisal-ANIMAL). Children showed a robust length effect (i.e. long…

The time course of the lowercase advantage in visual word recognition: An ERP investigation

Previous word identification and sentence reading experiments have consistently shown faster reading for lowercase than for uppercase words (e.g., table faster than TABLE). A theoretically relevant question for neural models of word recognition is whether the effect of letter-case only affects the early prelexical stages of visual word recognition or whether it also influences lexical-semantic processing. To examine the locus and nature of the lowercase advantage in visual word recognition, we conducted an event-related potential (ERP) lexical decision experiment. ERPs were recorded to words and pseudowords presented in lowercase or uppercase. Words also varied in lexical frequency, thus al…

READ-COGvid: A Database From Reading and Media Habits During COVID-19 Confinement in Spain and Italy

Letter-case information and the identification of brand names.

A central tenet of most current models of visual-word recognition is that lexical units are activated on the basis of case-invariant abstract letter representations. Here, we examined this assumption by using a unique type of words: brand names. The rationale of the experiments is that brand names are archetypically printed either in lowercase (e.g., adidas) or uppercase (e.g., IKEA). This allows us to present the brand names in their standard or non-standard case configuration (e.g., adidas, IKEA vs. ADIDAS, ikea, respectively). We conducted two experiments with a brand-decision task (‘is it a brand name?’): a single-presentation experiment and a masked priming experiment. Results in the s…

Un pequeño aumento en el espaciado entre letras favorece la lectura en niños disléxicos

Varias investigaciones recientes han mostrado que un ligero aumento del espaciado entre las letras (respecto al espaciado estándar) produce tiempos de lectura más rápidos en los niños con dislexia, así como mejoras en la comprensión de los textos. Si bien el aumento en el espaciado de las letras no “cura” la dislexia, sí permite una mejora en el proceso de lectura. Es importante remarcar que la posibilidad de modificar el espaciado entre letras se encuentra disponible en los programas de procesamiento de texto. Creemos que dicha opción debería estar disponible próximamente en los libros electrónicos.

Do handwritten words magnify lexical effects in visual word recognition?

Published online: 27 Oct 2015 An examination of how the word recognition system is able to process handwritten words is fundamental to formulate a comprehensive model of visual word recognition. Previous research has revealed that the magnitude of lexical effects (e.g., the word-frequency effect) is greater with handwritten words than with printed words. In the present lexical decision experiments, we examined whether the quality of handwritten words moderates the recruitment of top-down feedback, as reflected in word-frequency effects. Results showed a reading cost for difficult-to-read and easy-to-read handwritten words relative to printed words. But the critical finding was that difficul…

Attentional biases toward emotional images in the different episodes of bipolar disorder: an eye-tracking study.

Attentional biases toward emotional information may represent vulnerability and maintenance factors in bipolar disorder (BD). The present experimental study examined the processing of emotional information in BD patients using the eye-tracking technology. Bipolar patients in their different states (euthymia, mania, depression) simultaneously viewed four pictures with different emotional valence (happy, neutral, sad, threatening) for 20 s while their eye movements were monitored. A group of healthy individuals served as the control. The data revealed the following: (i) a decrease in attention to happy images in BD patients in their depressive episodes compared to healthy individuals, and (ii…

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…

The effects of interletter spacing in visual-word recognition.

Despite the importance of determining the effects of interletter spacing on visual-word recognition, this issue has often been neglected in the literature. The goal of the present study is to shed some light on this topic. The rationale is that a thin increase in interletter spacing, as in casino, may reduce lateral interference among internal letters without destroying a word's integrity and/or allow a more precise encoding of a word's letter positions. Here we examined whether identification times for word stimuli in a lexical decision task were faster when the target word had a slightly wider than default interletter spacing value relative to the default settings (e.g., casino vs. casino…

Does letter position coding depend on consonant/vowel status? Evidence with the masked priming technique

Recently, a number of input coding schemes (e.g., SOLAR model, SERIOL model, open-bigram model, overlap model) have been proposed that capture the transposed-letter priming effect (i.e., faster response times for jugde-JUDGE than for jupte-JUDGE). In their current version, these coding schemes do not assume any processing differences between vowels and consonants. However, in a lexical decision task, Perea and Lupker (2004, JML; Lupker, Perea, & Davis, 2008, L&CP) reported that transposed-letter priming effects occurred for consonant transpositions but not for vowel transpositions. This finding poses a challenge for these recently proposed coding schemes. Here, we report four masked priming…

A diffusion model account of normal and impaired readers.

Acquired aphasics and dyslexics with even very profound word reading impairments have been shown to perform relatively well on the lexical decision task (e.g., Buchanan, Hildebrandt, & MacKinnon, 1999), but direct contrasts with unimpaired participants data is often complicated by extremely long reaction times for patient data. The dissociation between lexical decision and word naming performance shown by these patients is of theoretical importance, and here we present an analysis of processing underlying the lexical decision task. We are able to determine what aspects of performance are affected by acquired aphasics in the lexical decision task. We fit lexical decision data from aphasic pa…

Sequential Effects of Phonological Priming in Visual Word Recognition

International audience; Two masked priming experiments were conducted to examine phonological priming of bisyllabic words in French, and in particular, whether it operates sequentially or in parallel. Bisyllabic target words were primed by pseudowords that shared either the first or the second phonological syllable of the target. Overlap of the first syllable only-not the second-produced facilitation in both the lexical decision and the naming tasks. These findings suggest that, for polysyllabic words, phonological codes are computed sequentially during silent reading and reading aloud.

Regressions and eye movements: Where and when

Reichle et al. argue that the mechanism that determines where to fixate the eyes is controlled mostly by low-level processes. Therefore, unlike other competing models (e.g., the SWIFT model), the E-Z Reader model cannot account for “global” regressions as a result of linguistic difficulties. We argue that the model needs to be extended to account for regressive saccades.

La “diversidad contextual” de las palabras como facilitador de la lectura

Eva M. Rosa, Marta Vergara-Martínez, Manuel Perea (miembros de la ERI-Lectura de la Universitat de València) y Jose L. Tapia (profesor de la Universidad Católica de Valencia San Vicente Mártir) presentan los resultados de su investigación sobre la “diversidad contextual” de las palabras como facilitador de la lectura en las Jornades Lectura Fàcil de la Generalitat Valenciana organizadas por la ERI-Lectura de la Universitat de València el 18-19 mayo de 2018. http://ir.uv.es/4zhj7IR

Attentional biases to emotional scenes in schizophrenia: An eye-tracking study

Attentional biases to emotional information may play a key role in the onset and course of schizophrenia. The aim of this experiment was to examine the attentional processing of four emotional scenes in competition (happy, neutral, sad, threatening) in 53 patients with schizophrenia and 51 controls. The eye movements were recorded in a 20-seconds free-viewing task. The results were: (i) patients showed increased attention on threatening scenes, compared to controls, in terms of attentional engagement and maintenance; (ii) patients payed less attention to happy scenes than controls, in terms of attentional maintenance; (iii) whereas positive symptoms were associated with a late avoidance of …

Letter Position Coding Across Modalities: The Case of Braille Readers

BackgroundThe question of how the brain encodes letter position in written words has attracted increasing attention in recent years. A number of models have recently been proposed to accommodate the fact that transposed-letter stimuli like jugde or caniso are perceptually very close to their base words.MethodologyHere we examined how letter position coding is attained in the tactile modality via Braille reading. The idea is that Braille word recognition may provide more serial processing than the visual modality, and this may produce differences in the input coding schemes employed to encode letters in written words. To that end, we conducted a lexical decision experiment with adult Braille…

Decomposing encoding and decisional components in visual-word recognition: a diffusion model analysis.

In a diffusion model, performance as measured by latency and accuracy in two-choice tasks is decomposed into different parameters that can be linked to underlying cognitive processes. Although the diffusion model has been utilized to account for lexical decision data, the effects of stimulus manipulations in previous experiments originated from just one parameter: the quality of the evidence. Here we examined whether the diffusion model can be used to effectively decompose the underlying processes during visual-word recognition. We explore this issue in an experiment that features a lexical manipulation (word frequency) that we expected to affect mostly the quality of the evidence (the dri…

Can parafoveal-on-foveal effects be obtained when reading an unspaced alphasyllabic script (Thai)?

One controversial question in the field of eye movements and reading is whether there is evidence of parafoveal-on-foveal effects. This is an important issue because some models of eye movements in reading make quite different predictions in this respect (e.g., E-Z Reader vs. SWIFT models). The aim of the current study was to investigate if parafoveal-on-foveal effects occur when reading Thai, an unspaced, alphasyllabic orthography. Word frequency (high and low) of the word to the right of the currently fixated word was manipulated to examine if it would influence processing of the fixated word. Thirty-six participants read single sentences while having their eye movements monitored. There …

¿Cuátna prátcica letcora hace fatla praa que poadmos leer palbraas con lertas trasnpuetsas?

Las letras son estímulos visuales especiales. Inmersas en palabras, nos cuesta mucho distinguir “cedro” de “cerdo”, lo cual se conoce como efecto de transposición. Este efecto sucede en menor grado con secuencias de dígitos o símbolos. ¿Cuándo comienzan las letras a tener ese estatus especial? En un experimento reciente de nuestro laboratorio demostramos que seis días de práctica intensiva no son suficientes, pero ya permiten vislumbrar los inicios de un procesamiento especial de las letras.

ERP correlates of transposed-letter priming effects: The role of vowels versus consonants

One key issue for any computational model of visual-word recognition is the choice of an input coding scheme for assigning letter position. Recent research has shown that pseudowords created by transposing two letters are very effective at activating the lexical representation of their base words (e.g., relovution activates REVOLUTION). We report a masked priming lexical decision experiment in which the pseudoword primes were created by transposing/replacing two consonants or two vowels while event-related potentials were recorded. The results showed a modulation of the amplitude at an early window (150-250 ms) and at the N400 component for vowels but not for consonant transpositions. In ad…

E-Hitz: A word frequency list and a program for deriving psycholinguistic statistics in an agglutinative language (Basque)

We describe a Windows program that enables users to obtain a broad range of statistics concerning the properties of word and nonword stimuli in an agglutinative language (Basque), including measures of word frequency (at the whole-word and lemma levels), bigram and biphone frequency, orthographic similarity, orthographic and phonological structure, and syllable-based measures. It is designed for use by researchers in psycholinguistics, particularly those concerned with recognition of isolated words and morphology. In addition to providing standard orthographic and phonological neighborhood measures, the program can be used to obtain information about other forms of orthographic similarity, …

Do transposed-letter similarity effects occur at a morpheme level? Evidence for morpho-orthographic decomposition

When does morphological decomposition occur in visual word recognition? An increasing body of evidence suggests the presence of early morphological processing. The present work investigates this issue via an orthographic similarity manipulation. Three masked priming lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine the transposed-letter similarity effect (e.g., jugde facilitates JUDGE more than the control jupbe) in polymorphemic and monomorphemic words. If morphological decomposition occurs at early stages of visual word recognition, we would expect an interaction with transposed-letter effects. Experiment 1 was carried out in Basque, which is an agglutinative language. The nonword pr…

Matrices of the frequency and similarity of Arabic letters and allographs

Published online: 19 February 2020 Indicators of letter frequency and similarity have long been available for Indo-European languages. They have not only been pivotal in controlling the design of experimental psycholinguistic studies seeking to determine the factors that underlie reading ability and literacy acquisition, but have also been useful for studies examining the more general aspects of human cognition. Despite their importance, however, such indicators are still not available for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), a language that, by virtue of its orthographic system, presents an invaluable environment for the experimental investigation of visual word processing. This paper presents fo…

Deaf readers benefit from lexical feedback during orthographic processing

Published: 23 August 2019 It has been proposed that poor reading abilities in deaf readers might be related to weak connections between the orthographic and lexical-semantic levels of processing. Here we used event related potentials (ERPs), known for their excellent time resolution, to examine whether lexical feedback modulates early orthographic processing. Twenty congenitally deaf readers made lexical decisions to target words and pseudowords. Each of those target stimuli could be preceded by a briefly presented matched-case or mismatched-case identity prime (e.g., ALTAR-ALTAR vs. altar- ALTAR). Results showed an early effect of case overlap at the N/P150 for all targets. Critically, thi…

What is the letter é?

Most orthographies contain both accented and non-accented vowels. But are they processed as variants of the same letter unit or as separate abstract units? Recent research in French has revealed th...

Constituent priming effects: Evidence for preserved morphological processing in healthy old readers

How elderly adults process morphologically complex words is still a matter of controversy. The present study explored whether compound word recognition is affected by ageing. A group of young adults and a group of older healthy adults were tested on a lexical decision task. Compound words were presented primed by their first constituent (book-BOOKSHOP), their second constituent (shop-BOOKSHOP), or by an unrelated word (house-BOOKSHOP). Results revealed that morphological processing is fully preserved in advanced age and that the magnitude of the constituent priming effect was similar for young and older adults.

Is the go/no-go lexical decision task an alternative to the yes/no lexical decision task?

In the go/no-go lexical decision task (LDT), participants are instructed to respond as quickly as they can when a word is presented and not to respond if a nonword is presented. By minimizing part of the response selection process in the experimental task, the impact of response decision time on the obtained lexical decision time is probably reduced relative to the standard yes/no LDT (Gordon, 1983). Experiments 1 and 2 show that the go/no-go LDT is sensitive to the effects of word frequency and associative priming--the magnitude of these effects is similar with the two tasks. More important, the go/no-go LDT has a number of advantages with respect to the "standard" yes/no LDT: It offers fa…

Neighborhood Effects in Visual Word Recognition and Reading

Are You Taking the Fastest Route to the RESTAURANT?

Abstract. Most words in books and digital media are written in lowercase. The primacy of this format has been brought out by different experiments showing that common words are identified faster in lowercase (e.g., molecule) than in uppercase (MOLECULE). However, there are common words that are usually written in uppercase (street signs, billboards; e.g., STOP, PHARMACY). We conducted a lexical decision experiment to examine whether the usual letter-case configuration (uppercase vs. lowercase) of common words modulates word identification times. To this aim, we selected 78 molecule-type words and 78 PHARMACY-type words that were presented in lowercase or uppercase. For molecule-type words,…

Effects of masked repetition priming and orthographic neighborhood in visual recognition of words.

Summay.-The role of orthographic neighborhood (neighborhood size and neighborhood Erequency) in visual-word recognition was analyzed using the masked repetition-priming paradigm. Specifically, we varied stimulus-onset asynchrony (33, 50, and 67 msec.) and type of prime (identical, unrelated, unprimed) in a lexical-decision task. Analyses show additive effects of repetition and stimulus-onset asynchrony. Further, the unrelated condition overestimated the repetition effects relative ro an unprimed condition. Fachtatory effects of neighborhood size and inhibitory effects of neighborhood frequency were also found. The results are interpreted in terms of current models of visual-word recognition…

Short article: Eye movements when reading text messaging (txt msgng)

The growing popularity of mobile-phone technology has led to changes in the way people—particularly younger people—communicate. A clear example of this is the advent of Short Message Service (SMS) language, which includes orthographic abbreviations (e.g., omitting vowels, as in wk, week) and phonetic respelling (e.g., using u instead of you). In the present study, we examined the pattern of eye movements during reading of SMS sentences (e.g., my hols wr gr8), relative to normally written sentences, in a sample of skilled “texters”. SMS sentences were created by using (mostly) orthographic or phonological abbreviations. Results showed that there is a reading cost—both at a local level and at…

Transposed-letter and laterality effects in lexical decision.

Two divided visual field lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine the role of the cerebral hemispheres in transposed-letter similarity effects. In Experiment 1, we created two types of nonwords: nonadjacent transposed-letter nonwords (TRADEGIA; the base word was TRAGEDIA, the Spanish for TRAGEDY) and two-letter different nonwords (orthographic controls: TRATEPIA). In Experiment 2, the controls were one-letter different nonwords (TRAGEPIA) instead of two-letter different nonwords (TRATEPIA). The effect of transposed-letter similarity was substantially greater in the right visual field (left hemisphere) than in the left visual field. Furthermore, nonwords created by transposing …

Why braille reading is important and how to study it /Por qué es importante la lectura en braille y cómo estudiarla

AbstractDespite its relevance in theoretical and practical terms, braille reading has received little attention from researchers. Awareness of the pros and cons of the different procedures used to examine braille reading is needed to facilitate the realization of systematic studies and to improve teaching methods in braille reading. This study provides a critical examination of braille reading methods and highlights key points for future studies on tactile reading.

The effect of neighborhood frequency in reading: Evidence with transposed-letter neighbors

Transposed-letter effects (e.g., jugde activates judge) pose serious models for models of visual-word recognition that use position-specific coding schemes. However, even though the evidence of transposed-letter effects with nonword stimuli is strong, the evidence for word stimuli is scarce and inconclusive. The present experiment examined the effect of neighborhood frequency during normal silent reading using transposed-letter neighbors (e.g., silver, sliver). Two sets of low-frequency words were created (equated in the number of substitution neighbors, word frequency, and number of letters), which were embedded in sentences. In one set, the target word had a higher frequency transposed-le…

Is there a cost at encoding words with joined letters during visual word recognition?

Abstract For simplicity, models of visual-word recognition have focused on printed words composed of separated letters, thus overlooking the processing of cursive words. Manso de Zuniga, Humphreys, and Evett (1991) claimed that there is an early “cursive normalization” encoding stage when processing written words with joined letters. To test this claim, we conducted a lexical decision experiment in which words were presented either with separated or joined letters. To examine if the cost of letter segmentation occurs early in processing, we also manipulated a factor (i.e., word-frequency) that is posited to affect subsequent lexical processing. Results showed faster response times for the w…

The time course of processing handwritten words: An ERP investigation

Available online 25 June 2021. Behavioral studies have shown that the legibility of handwritten script hinders visual word recognition. Furthermore, when compared with printed words, lexical effects (e.g., word-frequency effect) are magnified for less intelligible (difficult) handwriting (Barnhart and Goldinger, 2010; Perea et al., 2016). This boost has been interpreted in terms of greater influence of top-down mechanisms during visual word recognition. In the present experiment, we registered the participants’ ERPs to uncover top-down processing effects on early perceptual encoding. Participants’ behavioral and EEG responses were recorded to high- and low-frequency words that varied in scr…

Non-cognate translation priming effects in the same–different task: evidence for the impact of “higher level” information

Norris and colleagues have proposed that priming effects observed in the masked prime same–different task are based solely on pre-lexical orthographic information. This proposal was evaluated by examining translation priming effects from non-cognate translation equivalents using both Spanish–English and Japanese–English bilinguals in the same–different task. Although no priming was observed for Spanish–English bilinguals, who also produced very little translation priming in a lexical decision task, significant priming was observed for Japanese–English bilinguals. These results indicate that, although most of the priming in the same–different task has an orthographic basis, other types of pr…

On the role of consonants and vowels in visual-word processing: Evidence with a letter search paradigm

Prior research has shown that the search function in the visual letter search task may reflect the regularities of the orthographic structure of a given script. In the present experiment, we examined whether the search function of letter detection was sensitive to consonant-vowel status of a pre-cued letter. Participants had to detect the presence/absence of a previously cued letter target (either vowel or consonant) at the initial, central or final position in a five-letter Spanish word or pseudoword. Results showed a significant effect of consonant-vowel status on letter search function which paralleled the orthographic constraints of Spanish. When searching for a consonant, participants …

Does viotin activate violin more than viocin? On the use of visual cues during visual-word recognition.

The vast majority of neural and computational models of visual-word recognition assume that lexical access is achieved via the activation of abstract letter identities. Thus, a word’s overall shape should play no role in this process. In the present lexical decision experiment, we compared word-like pseudowords like viotín (same shape as its base word: violín) vs. viocín (different shape) in mature (college-aged skilled readers), immature (normally reading children), and immature/impaired (young readers with developmental dyslexia) word-recognition systems. Results revealed similar response times (and error rates) to consistent-shape and inconsistent-shape pseudowords for both adult skille…

ERP correlates of letter identity and letter position are modulated by lexical frequency

The encoding of letter position is a key aspect in all recently proposed models of visual-word recognition. We analyzed the impact of lexical frequency on letter position assignment by examining the temporal dynamics of lexical activation induced by pseudowords extracted from words of different frequencies. For each word (e.g., BRIDGE), we created two pseudowords: A transposed-letter (TL: BRIGDE) and a replaced-letter pseudoword (RL: BRITGE). ERPs were recorded while participants read words and pseudowords in two tasks: Semantic categorization (Experiment 1) and lexical decision (Experiment 2). For high-frequency stimuli, similar ERPs were obtained for words and TL-pseudowords, but the N400…

Masked Translation Priming Effects With Highly Proficient Simultaneous Bilinguals

One essential issue for models of bilingual memory organization is to what degree the representation from one of the languages is shared with the other language. In this study, we examine whether there is a symmetrical translation priming effect with highly proficient, simultaneous bilinguals. We conducted a masked priming lexical decision experiment with cognate and noncognate translation equivalents. Results showed a significant masked translation priming effect for both cognates and noncognates, with a greater priming effect for cognates. Furthermore, the magnitude of the translation priming was similar in the two directions. Thus, highly fluent bilinguals do develop symmetrical between…

Resolving the locus of cAsE aLtErNaTiOn effects in visual word recognition: Evidence from masked priming.

Determining the factors that modulate the early access of abstract lexical representations is imperative for the formulation of a comprehensive neural account of visual-word identification. There is a current debate on whether the effects of case alternation (e.g., tRaIn vs. train) have an early or late locus in the word-processing stream. Here we report a lexical decision experiment using a technique that taps the early stages of visual-word recognition (i.e., masked priming). In the design, uppercase targets could be preceded by an identity/unrelated prime that could be in lowercase or alternating case (e.g., table-TABLE vs. crash-TABLE; tAbLe-TABLE vs. cRaSh-TABLE). Results revealed that…

Phonological-Lexical Feedback during Early Abstract Encoding: The Case of Deaf Readers.

In the masked priming technique, physical identity between prime and target enjoys an advantage over nominal identity in nonwords (GEDA-GEDA faster than geda-GEDA). However, nominal identity overrides physical identity in words (e.g., REAL-REAL similar to real-REAL). Here we tested whether the lack of an advantage of the physical identity condition for words was due to top-down feedback from phonological-lexical information. We examined this issue with deaf readers, as their phonological representations are not as fully developed as in hearing readers. Results revealed that physical identity enjoyed a processing advantage over nominal identity not only in nonwords but also in words (GEDA-GE…

Position Coding in Two-Digit Arabic Numbers

Digit position coding in two-digit Arabic numbers was examined in two masked priming experiments. In Experiment 1, participants had to decide whether the presented stimulus was a two-digit Arabic number (e.g., 67) or not (e.g., G7). Target stimuli could be preceded by a prime which (i) shared one digit in the initial position (e.g., 13-18), (ii) shared one digit but in a different position (83-18), and (iii) was a transposed number (81-18). Two unrelated control conditions, equalized in terms of the distance between primes and targets with the experimental conditions, were also included (e.g., 79-18). Results showed a priming effect only when prime and target shared digits in the same posi…

Mood-congruent bias and attention shifts in the different episodes of bipolar disorder

An "affective" go/no-go task was used in the different episodes of bipolar patients (euthymic, depressed, and manic) to examine (1) the presence of a mood-congruent attentional bias; and (2) the patients' ability to inhibit and invert associations between stimuli and responses through blocks. A group of healthy individuals served as controls. Results revealed a mood-congruent attentional bias: patients in the manic episode processed positive information faster, whereas those in the depressive episode processed negative information faster. In contrast, neither euthymic patients nor healthy individuals showed any mood-congruent biases. Furthermore, there was a shift cost across blocks for hea…

Lexical competition is enhanced in the left hemisphere: Evidence from different types of orthographic neighbors

Two divided visual field lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine the role of the cerebral hemispheres in orthographic neighborhood effects. In Experiment 1, we employed two types of words: words with many substitution neighbors (high-N) and words with few substitution neighbors (low-N). Results showed a facilitative effect of N in the left visual field (i.e., right hemisphere) and an inhibitory effect of N in the right visual field (left hemisphere). In Experiment 2, we examined whether the inhibitory effect of the higher frequency neighbors increases in the left hemisphere as compared to the right hemisphere. To go beyond the usual N-metrics, we selected words with (or witho…

Do young readers have fast access to abstract lexical representations? Evidence from masked priming

Although there is consensus that adult readers have fast access to abstract letter/word representations, the developmental trajectory of such access has not been mapped out yet. To examine whether developmental readers have rapid access to abstract representations during the early stages of word processing, we conducted a masked priming lexical decision experiment with two groups of young readers (third and fifth graders) and a group of young adults. We selected two types of words: (a) words composed of cross-case letters that are visually dissimilar (DIS words; e.g., arte/ARTE [Spanish for art]) and (b) words composed of cross-case letters that are visually similar (SIM words; e.g., vivo/V…

Inhibitory Control for Emotional and Neutral Scenes in Competition: An Eye-Tracking Study in Bipolar Disorder

This study examined the inhibitory control of attention to social scenes in manic, depressive, and euthymic episodes of bipolar disorder (BD). Two scenes were simultaneously presented (happy/threatening/neutral [target] versus control). Participants were asked either to look at the emotional pictures (i.e., attend-to-emotional block) or to avoid looking at the emotional pictures (i.e., attend-to-neutral block) while their eye movements were recorded. The initial orienting (latency and percentage of first fixation) and subsequent attentional engagement (gaze duration) were computed. Manic patients showed a higher percentage of initial fixations on happy scenes than on the other scenes, regar…

ERP correlates of transposed-letter similarity effects: Are consonants processed differently from vowels?

Recent research has shown that pseudowords created by transposing letters are very effective for activating the lexical representation of their base words (e.g., relovution activates REVOLUTION). Furthermore, pseudoword transpositions of consonants are more similar to their corresponding base words than the transposition of vowels. We report one experiment using pseudowords created by the transposition of two consonants, two vowels, and their corresponding control conditions (i.e., the replacement of two consonants or two vowels) in a lexical decision task while Event Related Potentials (ERPs) were recorded. The results showed a modulation of the amplitude of the N400 component as a functio…

El papel de la sílaba en la codificación posicional de las representaciones ortográficas

El objetivo de este trabajo consiste en estudiar si la posición de las letras se codifica de una forma absoluta o relativa, y en particular, conocer el papel que la sílaba juega en la codificación de la información posicional dentro de las representaciones ortográficas. Para ello, empleamos dos experimentos con una tarea de solución de anagramas. En dicha tarea, se presenta un anagrama (CSIAGTO) y el participante tiene que descubrir la palabra que se forma ordenando las letras internas del anagrama (CASTIGO). Los resultados del Experimento 1 muestran un efecto de la presencia de bigramas adyacentes: los anagramas que mantienen un bigrama en una posición adyacente (CTGASIO) son resueltos con…

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)…

Los colores como claves perceptivas durante la lectura

En español, como en muchas otras ortografías, las palabras escritas están diferenciadas unas de otras mediante la inserción de espacios. El hecho de que haya lenguas que no utilizan espacios, y que añadirlos no mejore la lectura en dichas lenguas (v.g., en thai), relativiza la importancia de los espacios entre palabras. Experimentos recientes en nuestro laboratorio han mostrado que la segmentación perceptiva de las palabras puede conseguirse fácilmente alternando el color de las mismas, sin necesidad de espacios. Ello lleva a re-examinar el papel de los colores en el aprendizaje de la lectura.

Can colours be used to segment words when reading?

Rayner, Fischer, and Pollatsek (1998, Vision Research) demonstrated that reading unspaced text in Indo-European languages produces a substantial reading cost in word identification (as deduced from an increased word-frequency effect on target words embedded in the unspaced vs. spaced sentences) and in eye movement guidance (as deduced from landing sites closer to the beginning of the words in unspaced sentences). However, the addition of spaces between words comes with a cost: nearby words may fall outside high-acuity central vision, thus reducing the potential benefits of parafoveal processing. In the present experiment, we introduced a salient visual cue intended to facilitate the process…

Attention orienting and inhibitory control across the different mood states in bipolar disorder: An emotional antisaccade task

An antisaccade experiment, using happy, sad, and neutral faces, was conducted to examine the effect of mood-congruent information on inhibitory control (antisaccade task) and attentional orienting (prosaccade task) during the different episodes of bipolar disorder (BD) - manic (n=22), depressive (n=25), and euthymic (n=24). A group of 28 healthy controls was also included. Results revealed that symptomatic patients committed more antisaccade errors than healthy individuals, especially with mood-congruent faces. The manic group committed more antisaccade errors in response to happy faces, while the depressed group tended to commit more antisaccade errors in response to sad faces. Additionall…

Contextual diversity favors the learning of new words in children regardless of their comprehension skills

Available online 6 November 2021 Recent research has shown the benefits of high contextual diversity, defined as the number of different contexts in which a word appears, when incidentally learning new words. These benefits have been found both in laboratory settings and in ecological settings such as the classroom during regular hours. To examine the nature of this effect in young readers aged 11–13 years, we analyzed whether these benefits are modulated by the individuals’ reading comprehension scores; that is, would better comprehenders benefit the most from contextual diversity? The manipulation of contextual diversity was done by inserting the novel words into three different contexts/…

Supplementary_Material_ – Supplemental material for On the limits of familiarity accounts in lexical decision: The case of repetition effects

Supplemental material, Supplementary_Material_ for On the limits of familiarity accounts in lexical decision: The case of repetition effects by Manuel Perea, Ana Marcet, Marta Vergara-Martínez and Pablo Gomez in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

How are words with diacritical vowels represented in the mental lexicon? Evidence from Spanish and German

Recent research has shown that the omission of diacritics in words does not affect the initial contact with the lexical entries, as measured by masked priming. In the present study, we directly examined whether diacritics’ omission slows down lexical access using a single-presentation semantic categorisation task (“is the word an animal name?”). We did so in a language in which diacritics reflect lexical stress but not vowel quality (Spanish; e.g. ratón [mouse] vs. raton; Experiment 1) and in a language in which diacritics reflect vowel quality but not lexical stress (German; e.g. Kröte vs. Krote; Experiment 2). In Spanish, word response times were similar for words with diacritics that wer…

Jalapeno or jalapeño: Do diacritics in consonant letters modulate visual similarity effects during word recognition?

AbstractPrior research has shown that word identification times to DENTIST are faster when briefly preceded by a visually similar prime (dentjst; i↔j) than when preceded by a visually dissimilar prime (dentgst). However, these effects of visual similarity do not occur in the Arabic alphabet when the critical letter differs in the diacritical signs: for the target the visually similar one-letter replaced prime (compare and is no more effective than the visually dissimilar one-letter replaced prime Here we examined whether this dissociative pattern is due to the special role of diacritics during word processing. We conducted a masked priming lexical decision experiment in Spanish using target…

Atención y procesamiento emocional en personas con trastorno bipolar

Las personas con trastorno bipolar se caracterizan por una desregulación emocional que afecta a cómo atienden a la información que les rodea. Investigaciones recientes han encontrado sesgos atencionales en las personas con trastorno bipolar, tanto cuando su estado de ánimo es bajo (mayor atención a palabras negativas y rostros tristes) como cuando su estado de ánimo es elevado (mayor atención a palabras positivas y caras alegres). Es importante destacar que, en personas con depresión, estos sesgos pueden entrenarse de manera que disminuye la sintomatología afectiva. Esta opción podría contemplarse como una nueva alternativa de intervención en el trastorno bipolar.

¿Pueden los juegos mejorar la habilidad lectora?

Investigaciones recientes han mostrado que las habilidades lectoras pueden ser moduladas mediante el entrenamiento en juegos/videojuegos. Dado que un déficit en atención visual puede ser causante de la dislexia, el entrenamiento en videojuegos puede mejorar la atención visual, lo cual puede ayudar al tratamiento de la dislexia. Pero también un juego de mesa como es el Scrabble puede mejorar las habilidades lectoras: los jugadores expertos de Scrabble tienen unas destrezas ortográfico-léxicas más eficientes que los no expertos. Trabajos futuros han de centrarse en examinar qué beneficios aporta el entrenamiento mediante juegos/videojuegos en la mejora del aprendizaje lector.

Facilitation versus inhibition in the masked priming same-different matching task.

In the past years, growing attention has been devoted to the masked priming same–different task introduced by Norris and Kinoshita (2008, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General). However, a number of researchers have raised concerns on the nature of the cognitive processes underlying this task—in particular the suspicion that masked priming effects in this task are mostly inhibitory in nature and may be affected by probe–prime contingency. To examine the pattern of facilitative/inhibitory priming effects in this task, we conducted two experiments with an incremental priming paradigm using four stimulus–onset asynchronies (13, 27, 40, and 53 ms). Experiment 1 was conducted under a pred…

The role of letter features in visual-word recognition: Evidence from a delayed segment technique.

Available online 9 June 2016 Do all visual features in aword's constituent letters have the same importance during lexical access? Herewe examined whether some components of a word's letters (midsegments, junctions, terminals) are more important than others. To that end,we conducted two lexical decision experiments using a delayed segment techniquewith lowercase stimuli. In this technique a partial previewappears for 50ms and is immediately followed by the target item. In Experiment 1, the partial preview was composed of terminals+junctions,midsegments+junctions, or midsegments + terminals — a whole preview condition was used as a control. Results only revealed an advantage of the whole pre…

SMS: impacto social y cognitivo

El creciente uso de los mensajes de texto (en adelante SMS) ha llevado a debatir el impacto social y los efectos psicológicos de este nuevo medio de comunicación. En los últimos años la utilización masiva de teléfonos móviles e Internet ha generado un nuevo modelo de comunicación caracterizado por el uso abreviado del lenguaje. En este trabajo se examina el papel de los SMS como herramienta de comunicación efectiva que en muchas ocasiones representa una forma de entablar relaciones sociales entre los individuos jóvenes. Adicionalmente, se examina el coste cognitivo que supone la lectura de los SMS. De este análisis y de la reflexión del contenido de las frases se extraen dos conclusiones. L…

Does Kaniso activate CASINO?: input coding schemes and phonology in visual-word recognition.

Most recent input coding schemes in visual-word recognition assume that letter position coding is orthographic rather than phonological in nature (e.g., SOLAR, open-bigram, SERIOL, and overlap). This assumption has been drawn – in part – by the fact that the transposed-letter effect (e.g., caniso activates CASINO) seems to be (mostly) insensitive to phonological manipulations (e.g., Perea & Carreiras, 2006 , 2008 ; Perea & Pérez, 2009 ). However, one could argue that the lack of a phonological effect in prior research was due to the fact that the manipulation always occurred in internal letter positions – note that phonological effects tend to be stronger for the initial syllable (…

Attentional processing biases to threat in schizophrenia: Evidence from a free-viewing task with emotional scenes

Attentional biases to threatening stimuli have been suggested to play a key role in the onset and course of schizophrenia. However, current research has not completely demonstrated this assumption. The aim of this eye-tracking study was to shed light on the underlying psychological mechanisms of schizophrenia by examining the attentional processing of socio-emotional information. Forty-four individuals with schizophrenia and 47 healthy controls were assessed in a 3-s free-viewing task with a social scene (i.e., happy, threatening, or neutral) in competition with a non-social one to determine the effects of emotional information on the different stages of the attentional processing. The loca…

Testing the flexibility of the modified receptive field (MRF) theory: evidence from an unspaced orthography (Thai).

In the current study, we tested the generality of the modified receptive field (MRF) theory (Tydgat & Grainger, 2009) with English native speakers (Experiment 1) and Thai native speakers (Experiment 2). Thai has a distinctive alphabetic orthography with visually complex letters (ฝ ฟ or ผ พ) and nonlinear characteristics and lacks interword spaces. We used a two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) procedure to measure identification accuracy for all positions in a string of five characters, which consisted of Roman script letters, Thai letters, or symbols. For the English speakers, we found a similar pattern of results as in previous studies (i.e., a dissociation between letters and symbols). I…

Space information is important for reading

AbstractReading a text without spaces in an alphabetic language causes disruption at the levels of word identification and eye movement control. In the present experiment, we examined how word discriminability affects the pattern of eye movements when reading unspaced text in an alphabetic language. More specifically, we designed an experiment in which participants read three types of sentences: normally written sentences, regular unspaced sentences, and alternatingbold unspaced sentences. Although there was a reading cost in the unspaced sentences relative to the normally written sentences, this cost was much smaller in alternatingbold unspaced sentences than in regular unspaced sentences.

Influence of computer feedback on attentional biases to emotional faces in children

We examined which type of corrective feedback in a computerized task produces an optimal balance between performance and emotional reactions in children. To that end, we conducted an emotional dot-probe task. We employed three types of corrective feedback (negative, positive, or mixed) along with a control, non-feedback condition. We tested the effect of feedback on: (i) task performance; (ii) immediate emotional reactions in terms of attentional preferences toward emotional faces (happy, sad, and angry); and (iii) self-reported affective experience after the task. Results showed that children committed more errors in the non-feedback group than in the mixed and negative feedback groups. Fu…

Short article: Does the brain regularize digits and letters to the same extent?

The cognitive system does not just act as a mirror from the sensory input; instead, it tends to normalize this information. Given that letter processing seems to be much more specialized than digit processing in the cortex, we examined whether the regularization process occurs differently from digits to letters than from letters to digits: We employed a masked priming same/different experiment (e.g., probe, VESZED; prime, V35Z3D; and target, VESZED). When embedded in letter strings, digits that resemble letters (e.g., 3 and 5 in V35Z3D-VESZED) tend to be encoded in a letter-like manner, whereas when embedded in digit strings, letters that resemble digits (e.g., E and S in 9ES7E2–935732) te…

The what, when, where, and how of visual word recognition

A long-standing debate in reading research is whether printed words are perceived in a feedforward manner on the basis of orthographic information, with other representations such as semantics and phonology activated subsequently, or whether the system is fully interactive and feedback from these representations shapes early visual word recognition. We review recent evidence from behavioral, functional magnetic resonance imaging, electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography, and biologically plausible connectionist modeling approaches, focusing on how each approach provides insight into the temporal flow of information in the lexical system. We conclude that, consistent with interactive a…

Transposed-Letter Priming Effects for Close Versus Distant Transpositions

Transposing two internal letters of a word produces a perceptually similar item (e.g., CHOLOCATE being processed as CHOCOLATE). To determine the precise nature of the encoding of letter position within a word, we examined the effect of the number of intervening letters in transposed-letter effects with a masked priming procedure. In Experiment 1, letter transposition could involve adjacent letters (chocloate-CHOCOLATE) and nonadjacent letters with two intervening letters (choaolcte-CHOCOLATE). Results showed that the magnitude of the transposed-letter priming effect – relative to the appropriate control condition – was greater when the transposition involved adjacent letters than when it i…

Ability for Voice Recognition Is a Marker for Dyslexia in Children

A recent voice recognition experiment conducted by Perrachione, Del Tufo, and Gabrieli (2011) revealed that, in normal adult readers, the accuracy at identifying human voices was better in the participants’ mother tongue than in an unfamiliar language, while this difference was absent in a group of adults with dyslexia. This pattern favored a view of dyslexia as due to “fundamentally impoverished native-language phonological representations.” To further examine this issue, we conducted two voice recognition experiments, one with children with/without dyslexia, and the other with adults with/without dyslexia. Results revealed that children/adults with dyslexia were less accurate at identify…

Can CANISO activate CASINO? Transposed-letter similarity effects with nonadjacent letter positions

Nonwords created by transposing two adjacent letters (i.e., transposed-letter (TL) nonwords like jugde) are very effective at activating the lexical representation of their base words. This fact poses problems for most computational models of word recognition (e.g., the interactive-activation model and its extensions), which assume that exact letter positions are rapidly coded during the word recognition process. To examine the scope of TL similarity effects further, we asked whether TL similarity effects occur for nonwords created by exchanging two nonadjacent letters (e.g., canisoCASINO) in three masked form priming experiments using the lexical decision task. The two nonadjacent transpos…

Efectos de la estructura silábica en el priming silábico

Resumen en inglés. Resumen basado en el de la publicación La sílaba se considera una unidad de acceso en el reconocimiento visual de palabras. Diferentes estudios han evidenciado el papel de la sílaba manipulando la frecuencia silábica y mediante el priming silábico. Se estudia si los efectos del priming silábico se encuentran modulados por la estructura de la sílaba inicial. Se realizaron tres experimentos de decisión léxica con asincronías señal-test entre las 64 y 320 milésimas de segundo que mostraron un claro efecto de priming silábico para palabras de estructura CV en la sílaba inicial, pero no cuando la sílaba inicial tenía estructura CVC. Este hallazgo tiene implicaciones para los m…

Which Factors Modulate Letter Position Coding in Pre-literate Children?

One of the central landmarks of learning to read is the emergence of orthographic processing (i.e., the encoding of letter identity and letter order): it constitutes the necessary link between the low-level stages of visual processing and the higher-level processing of words. Regarding the processing of letter position, many experiments have shown worse performance in various tasks for the transposed-letter pair judge-JUDGE than for the orthographic control jupte-JUDGE. Importantly, 4-y.o. pre-literate children also show letter transposition effects in a same-different task: TZ-ZT is more error-prone than TZ-PH. Here, we examined whether this effect with pre-literate children is related to …

Does the proportion of associatively related pairs modulate the associative priming effect at very brief stimulus-onset asynchronies?

A number of experiments have shown that the magnitude of the associative priming effect increases substantially when there is a high proportion of associatively related pairs in the list when the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) between prime and target is long (more than 400 ms). In the present series of experiments we manipulated the proportion of associatively related pairs when the SOA was very brief (less than 200 ms). If processing of a target word is facilitated automatically by the prior presentation of a related prime, the occurrence of priming should be unaffected by the proportion of related pairs in the list. Experiment 1 showed a robust relatedness proportion effect obtained in …

Subtle Increases in Interletter Spacing Facilitate the Encoding of Words during Normal Reading

BackgroundSeveral recent studies have revealed that words presented with a small increase in interletter spacing are identified faster than words presented with the default interletter spacing (i.e., w a t e r faster than water). Modeling work has shown that this advantage occurs at an early encoding level. Given the implications of this finding for the ease of reading in the new digital era, here we examined whether the beneficial effect of small increases in interletter spacing can be generalized to a normal reading situation.MethodologyWe conducted an experiment in which the participant's eyes were monitored when reading sentences varying in interletter spacing: i) sentences were present…

Masked associative/semantic priming effects across languages with highly proficient bilinguals

One key issue for models of bilingual memory is to what degree the semantic representation from one of the languages is shared with the other language. In the present paper, we examine whether there is an early, automatic semantic priming effect across languages for noncognates with highly proficient (Basque/Spanish) bilinguals. Experiment 1 was a between-language masked semantic priming lexical decision experiment. Results showed a significant between-language semantic priming effect for both Basque–Spanish and Spanish–Basque pairs. Experiment 2 showed that the magnitude of the between-language and within-language masked semantic priming effects was quite similar. Experiment 3 replicated t…

Cómo conseguir mejorar el aprendizaje de palabras

Muchas de las palabras que conocemos no han sido adquiridas mediante un esfuerzo explícito, sino de manera incidental. Pero se sabe relativamente poco sobre los factores que modulan el aprendizaje implícito de vocabulario. Varios experimentos recientes han mostrado que las palabras nuevas se adquieren mejor cuando se aprenden en diferentes contextos que en un mismo contexto. Estos hallazgos apoyan la idea de organizar un currículo educativo transversal que mejore la adquisición de vocabulario tanto en la lengua materna (v.g., a través de diferentes asignaturas) como en otras lenguas.

Do transposed-letter effects occur across lexeme boundaries?

A masked priming lexical decision experiment was conducted to examine whether or not assignment of letter position in a word can be influenced by lexeme boundaries. The experiment was run in Basque, which is a strongly agglutinating language with a high proportion of inflected and compound words. Nonword primes were created by transposing two nonadjacent letters that crossed or did not cross morphological boundaries. Specifically, we compared morphologically complex prime-target pairs (e.g., arbigide-ARGIBIDE) with orthographic controls (e.g., arkipide-ARGIBIDE; note that ARGIBIDE is a compound of ARGI + BIDE) and noncompound pairs (e.g., ortakila--ORKATILA) with orthographic controls (e.g.…

The bilingualism wars: Is the bilingual advantage out of (executive) control?

espanolUno de los temas actuales mas controvertidos en psicologia cognitiva y neurociencia cognitiva es si el bilinguismo tiene un efecto sobre el control ejecutivo de las representaciones no verbales. En su vida diaria, los bilingues tienen que alternar entre dos (o mas) idiomas que compiten por su seleccion, por lo que han de seleccionar, monitorizar e inhibir (es decir, emplear componentes de la funcion ejecutiva) con mas frecuencia que los monolingues. Por lo tanto, no seria sorprendente que estas habilidades empleadas para seleccionar/monitorear los procesos linguisticos en bilingues tambien ayudaran al procesamiento de representaciones no linguisticas. Aunque la "ventaja bilingue" en …

The Omission of Accent Marks Does Not Hinder Word Recognition: Evidence From Spanish

Recent research has found that the omission of accent marks in Spanish does not produce slower word identification times in go/no-go lexical decision and semantic categorization tasks [e.g., cárcel (prison) = carcel], thus suggesting that vowels like á and a are represented by the same orthographic units during word recognition and reading. However, there is a discrepant finding with the yes/no lexical decision task, where the words with the omitted accent mark produced longer response times than the words with the accent mark. In Experiment 1, we examined this discrepant finding by running a yes/no lexical decision experiment comparing the effects for words and non-words. Results showed sl…

Do children with overweight respond faster to food-related words?

Abstract Overweight in childhood is a risk factor in developing obesity as an adult, thus having severe consequences on the individuals’ physical health and psychological well-being. Therefore, studying the cognitive and emotional processes that sustain overweight is essential not only at a theoretical level but also to develop effective interventions. In the present experiment, we examined whether children with overweight respond faster to food-related than non-food-related words in a word recognition task: lexical decision. The participants were 24 children diagnosed with exogenous overweight and 24 children with a healthy weight. The stimulus list included positively valenced food-relate…

Contextual diversity facilitates learning new words in the classroom.

Published: June 6, 2017 In the field of word recognition and reading, it is commonly assumed that frequently repeated words create more accessible memory traces than infrequently repeated words, thus capturing the word-frequency effect. Nevertheless, recent research has shown that a seemingly related factor, contextual diversity (defined as the number of different contexts [e.g., films] in which a word appears), is a better predictor than word-frequency in word recognition and sentence reading experiments. Recent research has shown that contextual diversity plays an important role when learning new words in a laboratory setting with adult readers. In the current experiment, we directly mani…

Are better young readers more likely to confuse their mother with their mohter?

One of the most replicated effects in the contemporary word recognition literature is the transposed-letter effect (TL effect): pseudowords created by the transposition of two letters (e.g., MOHTER) are often misread as the real word. This effect ruled out those accounts that assume that letter position is encoded accurately and led to more flexible coding schemes. Here, we examined whether reading skill modulates this effect. The relationship between reading skill and the TL effect magnitude is a contentious issue both empirically and theoretically. The present lexical decision experiment was designed to shed some light on the relationship between reading skill and the TL effect magnitude…

Are syllables phonological units in visual word recognition?

A number of studies have shown that syllables play an important role in visual word recognition in Spanish. We report three lexical decision experiments with a masked priming technique that examined whether syllabic effects are phonological or orthographic in nature. In all cases, primes were nonwords. In Experiment 1, latencies to CV words were faster when primes and targets shared the first syllable (€ju.nas-JU.NIO) than when they shared the initial letters but not the first syllable (€jun.tu-JU.NIO). In Experiment 2, this syllabic overlap could be phonological+orthographical (vi.rel-VI.RUS) or just phonological (bi.rel-VI.RUS). A syllable priming effect was found for CV words in both the…

Does Extra Interletter Spacing Help Text Reading in Skilled Adult Readers?

AbstractA number of experiments have shown that, in skilled adult readers, a small increase in interletter spacing speeds up the process of visual word recognition relative to the default settings (i.e., judge faster than judge). The goal of the present experiment was to examine whether this effect can be generalized to a more ecological scenario: text reading. Each participant read two stories (367 words each) taken from a standardized reading test. The stories were presented with the standard interletter spacing or with a small increase in interletter spacing (+1.2 points to default) in a within-subject design. An eyetracker was used to register the participants’ eye movements. Comprehens…

Attentional capture by emotional scenes across episodes in bipolar disorder: Evidence from a free-viewing task

We examined whether the initial orienting, subsequent engagement, and overall allocation of attention are determined exogenously (i.e. by the affective valence of the stimulus) or endogenously (i.e. by the participant's mood) in the manic, depressive and euthymic episodes of bipolar disorder (BD). Participants were asked to compare the affective valence of two pictures (happy/threatening/neutral [emotional] vs. neutral [control]) while their eye movements were recorded in a free-viewing task. Results revealed that the initial orienting was exogenously captured by emotional images relative to control images. Importantly, engagement and overall allocation were endogenously captured by threate…

Language does not modulate fake news credibility, but emotion does

Abstract The proliferation of fake news in internet requires understanding which factors modulate their credibility and take actions to limit their impact. A number of recent studies have shown an effect of the foreign language when making decisions: reading in a foreign language engages a more rational, analytic mode of thinking (Costa et al., 2014, Cognition). This analytic mode of processing may lead to a decrease in the credibility of fake news. Here we conducted two experiments to examine whether fake news stories presented to university students were more credible in the native language than in a foreign language. Bayesian analyses in both experiments offered support for the hypothesi…

I saw this somewhere else: the Spanish Ambiguous Words (SAW) database

The present paper describes the Spanish Ambiguous Words (SAW) database, which comprises 210 words (133 polysemous and 77 homographs). Three-hundred and fifteen Spanish university students took part in the study on which SAW is based. First, subjective word meanings and senses were collected by means of a meaning retrieval task. Two judges then assigned participants’ responses to different categories of meaning according to lexicographical and statistical criteria. Results showed that, while there was a relatively high relationship between the number of senses included in the dictionary and those provided by participants (r = .62), regression analyses on lexical decision and naming times rev…

Do affective episodes modulate moral judgment in individuals with bipolar disorder?

Abstract Background Bipolar disorder (BD) patients experience altered emotional states and deficits in social adaptation that may also be involved in deontological moral judgments in which participants have to choose whether to sacrifice one person in order to save the lives of a greater number. Methods In the present study we compared the utilitarian responses of BD patients in their different states (euthymia, mania, depression) and healthy controls to moral dilemmas with low (impersonal dilemma) and high (personal dilemma) emotional saliency. Results Our findings revealed an increased tendency to utilitarian judgments in the three groups of BD patients in impersonal dilemmas relative to …

On the flexibility of letter position coding during lexical processing: Evidence from eye movements when reading Thai

Previous research supports the view that initial letter position has a privileged role in comparison to internal letters for visual-word recognition in Roman script. The current study examines whether this is the case for Thai. Thai is an alphabetic script in which ordering of the letters does not necessarily correspond to the ordering of a word's phonemes. Furthermore, Thai does not normally have interword spaces. We examined whether the position of transposed letters (internal, e.g., porblem, vs. initial, e.g., rpoblem) within a word influences how readily those words are processed when interword spacing and demarcation of word boundaries (using alternatingbold text) is manipulated. The …

Does Bold Emphasis Facilitate the Process of Visual-Word Recognition?

AbstractThe study of the effects of typographical factors on lexical access has been rather neglected in the literature on visual-word recognition. Indeed, current computational models of visual-word recognition employ an unrefined letter feature level in their coding schemes. In a letter recognition experiment, Pelli, Burns, Farell, and Moore-Page (2006), letters in Bookman boldface produced more efficiency (i.e., a higher ratio of thresholds of an ideal observer versus a human observer) than the letters in Bookman regular under visual noise. Here we examined whether the effect of bold emphasis can be generalized to a common visual-word recognition task (lexical decision: “is the item a wo…

A challenging dissociation in masked identity priming with the lexical decision task.

Abstract The masked priming technique has been used extensively to explore the early stages of visual-word recognition. One key phenomenon in masked priming lexical decision is that identity priming is robust for words, whereas it is small/unreliable for nonwords. This dissociation has usually been explained on the basis that masked priming effects are lexical in nature, and hence there should not be an identity prime facilitation for nonwords. We present two experiments whose results are at odds with the assumption made by models that postulate that identity priming is purely lexical, and also challenge the assumption that word and nonword responses are based on the same information. Our e…

Electrophysiological signatures of masked transposition priming in a same-different task: Evidence with strings of letters vs. pseudoletters

Research on masked transposed-letter priming (i.e., jugde-JUDGE triggers a faster response than jupte-JUDGE) has become a key phenomenon to reveal how the brain encodes letter position. Recent behavioural evidence suggests that the mechanism responsible for position coding in a masked priming procedure works with familiar "object" identities (e.g., letters, digits, symbols) but not with unfamiliar object identities (e.g., pseudoletters). Here we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to explore the time course of masked transposition priming of letters vs. pseudoletters in a cue-target same-different matching task. Target stimuli were preceded by a masked prime that could be: (i) identical to…

Smart Phone, Smart Science: How the Use of Smartphones Can Revolutionize Research in Cognitive Science

WOS:000295936900019; International audience; Investigating human cognitive faculties such as language, attention, and memory most often relies on testing small and homogeneous groups of volunteers coming to research facilities where they are asked to participate in behavioral experiments. We show that this limitation and sampling bias can be overcome by using smartphone technology to collect data in cognitive science experiments from thousands of subjects from all over the world. This mass coordinated use of smartphones creates a novel and powerful scientific "instrument" that yields the data necessary to test universal theories of cognition. This increase in power represents a potential re…

There is no clam with coats in the calm coast: delimiting the transposed-letter priming effect.

In this article, we explore the transposed-letter priming effect (e.g., jugde–JUDGE vs. jupte–JUDGE), a phenomenon that taps into some key issues on how the brain encodes letter positions and has favoured the creation of new input coding schemes. However, almost all the empirical evidence from transposed-letter priming experiments comes from nonword primes (e.g., jugde–JUDGE). Indeed, previous evidence when using word–word pairs (e.g., causal–CASUAL) is not conclusive. Here, we conducted five masked priming lexical decision experiments that examined the relationship between pairs of real words that differed only in the transposition of two of their letters (e.g., CASUAL vs. CAUSAL). Result…

Can letter position encoding be modified by visual perceptual elements?

A plethora of studies has revealed that letter position coding is relatively flexible during word recognition (e.g., the transposed-letter [TL] pseudoword CHOLOCATE is frequently misread as CHOCOLATE). A plausible explanation of this phenomenon is that letter identity and location are not perfectly bound as a consequence of the limitations of the visual system. Thus, a complete characterization of letter position coding requires an examination of how letter position coding can be modulated by visual perceptual elements. Here we conducted three lexical decision experiments with TL and replacement-letter pseudowords that manipulated the visual characteristics of the stimuli. In Experiment 1,…

Naming pseudowords in Spanish: effects of syllable frequency.

Three naming experiments were conducted to examine the role of the first and the second syllable during speech production in Spanish. Facilitative effects of syllable frequency with disyllabic words have been reported in Dutch and Spanish (Levelt & Wheeldon, 1994; Perea & Carreiras, 1998). In both cases, the syllable frequency effect was independent of-and additive to-the effect of word frequency. However, Levelt and Wheeldon (1994) found that words ending in a high-frequency syllable were named faster than words ending in a low-frequency syllable, whereas Perea and Carreiras (1998) found a facilitative effect of syllable frequency for the initial syllable. In Experiments 1-2, we manipulate…

Beyond alphabetic orthographies: The role of form and phonology in transposition effects in Katakana

In the past years, there has been growing interest in how the order of letters is attained in visual word recognition. Two critical issues are: (1) whether the front-end of the recently proposed models of letter position encoding can be generalised to non-alphabetic scripts, and (2) whether phonology plays an important role in the process of letter position encoding. In the present masked priming lexical decision experiments, we employed a syllabic/moraic script (Katakana), which allows disentangling form and phonology. In Experiment 1, we found a robust masked transposed-mora priming effect: the prime a.ri.me.ka facilitates the processing of the word a.me.ri.ka relative to a double-substit…

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 omitting the accent mark in a word affect sentence reading? Evidence from Spanish

Lexical stress in multisyllabic words is consistent in some languages (e.g., first syllable in Finnish), but it is variable in others (e.g., Spanish, English). To help lexical processing in a transparent language like Spanish, scholars have proposed a set of rules specifying which words require an accent mark indicating lexical stress in writing. However, recent word recognition using that lexical decision showed that word identification times were not affected by the omission of a word’s accent mark in Spanish. To examine this question in a paradigm with greater ecological validity, we tested whether omitting the accent mark in a Spanish word had a deleterious effect during silent sentenc…

Where is the locus of the lowercase advantage during sentence reading?

While most models of visual word identification and reading posit that a word's visual codes are rapidly transformed onto case-invariant representations (i.e., table and TABLE would equally activate the word unit corresponding to "table"), a number of experiments have shown a lowercase advantage in various word identification and reading tasks. In the present experiment, we examined the locus of this lowercase advantage by comparing the pattern of eye movements when reading sentences in lowercase vs. uppercase. Each sentence contained a target word that was high or low in word-frequency. Overall, results showed faster reading times for lowercase than for uppercase sentences. More important,…

¿Podemos agilizar la lectura en aprendices de chino?

Una de las dificultades que conlleva el aprendizaje del chino es que las palabras escritas no están delimitadas. Una estrategia para minimizar dicha dificultad es añadir espacios entre palabras, pero ello genera un patrón alterado de los movimientos oculares que reduce la eficiencia del procesamiento visual. Una mejor opción es colorear alternadamente las palabras de un texto. Esta manipulación produce tiempos de lectura más rápidos en lectores principiantes de chino y ayuda en textos con palabras poco familiares en lectores adultos. Por tanto, la coloración alternada es una buena opción para agilizar el aprendizaje lector en chino.

sj-docx-1-qjp-10.1177_17470218211012960 – Supplemental material for Are better young readers more likely to confuse their mother with their mohter?

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-qjp-10.1177_17470218211012960 for Are better young readers more likely to confuse their mother with their mohter? by Pablo Gomez, Ana Marcet and Manuel Perea in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

The role of the frequency of constituents in compound words: evidence from Basque and Spanish.

Recent data from compound word processing suggests that compounds are recognized via their constituent lexemes (Juhasz, Starr, Inhoff, & Placke, 2003). The present lexical decision experiment manipulated orthogonally the frequency of the constituents of compound words in two languages: Basque and Spanish. Basque and Spanish diverge widely in their morphological properties and in the number of existing compound words. Furthermore, the head lexeme (i.e., the most meaningful lexeme related to the whole-word meaning) in Spanish tends to be the second lexeme, whereas in Basque the percentage is more distributed. Results showed a facilitative effect of the frequency of the second lexeme, in both …

Tracking the Emergence of the Consonant Bias in Visual-Word Recognition: Evidence with Developing Readers

Recent research with skilled adult readers has consistently revealed an advantage of consonants over vowels in visual-word recognition (i.e., the so-called "consonant bias"). Nevertheless, little is known about how early in development the consonant bias emerges. This work aims to address this issue by studying the relative contribution of consonants and vowels at the early stages of visual-word recognition in developing readers (2(nd) and 4(th) Grade children) and skilled adult readers (college students) using a masked priming lexical decision task. Target words starting either with a consonant or a vowel were preceded by a briefly presented masked prime (50 ms) that could be the same as t…

Corrigendum to “Attention orienting and inhibitory control across the different mood states in bipolar disorder: An emotional antisaccade task” [Biol. Psychol. 94 (3) (2013) 556–561]

Are go/no-go tasks preferable to two-choice tasks in response time experiments with older adults?

Epub ahead of print 02/11/2015 Recent research has shown that, in response time (RT) tasks, the go/no-go response procedure produces faster (and less noisy) RTs and fewer errors than the two-choice response procedure in children, although these differences are substantially smaller in college-aged adults. Here we examined whether the go/no-go procedure can be preferred to the two-choice procedure in RT experiments with older adults (i.e. another population with slower and more error-prone responding than college-aged individuals). To that end, we compared these response procedures in two experiments with older adults (Mage = 83 years): a visual word recognition task (lexical decision) and a…

Do orthotactics and phonology constrain the transposed-letter effect?

Transposing two internal letters of a word produces a perceptually similar item (as in cholocate). To determine the precise nature of the encoding of letter position within a word, it is important to examine the role of orthography and phonology in the transposed-letter effect. Experiment 1 examined whether transposed-letter effects are affected by the legality of the letter transposition in a masked priming paradigm (e.g., comsos-COSMOS vs. vebral-VERBAL; ‘ms’ is an illegal bigram in Spanish). Results showed a greater transposed-letter priming effect when the transposed bigram was illegal than when it was legal. In Experiment 2, we examine the role of phonology by exploiting the context-de…

Does Tonal Information Affect the Early Stages of Visual-Word Processing in Thai?

Thai offers a unique opportunity to investigate the role of lexical tone processing during visual-word recognition, as tone is explicitly expressed in its script. In order to investigate the contribution of tone at the orthographic/phonological level during the early stages of word processing in Thai, we conducted a masked priming experiment—using both lexical decision and word naming tasks. For a given target word (e.g., ห้อง/hᴐ:ŋ2/, room), five priming conditions were created: (a) identity (e.g., ห้อง/hᴐ:ŋ2/), (b) same initial consonant, but with a different tone marker (e.g., ห่อง/hᴐ:ŋ1/), (c) different initial consonant, but with the same tone marker (e.g., ศ้อง/sᴐ:ŋ2/), (d) orthograph…

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.…

Is VIRTU4L larger than VIR7UAL? Automatic processing of number quantity and lexical representations in leet words.

Recent research has shown that leet words (i.e., words in which some of the letters are replaced by visually similar digits; e.g., VIRTU4L) can be processed as their base words without much cost. However, it remains unclear whether the digits inserted in leet words are simply processed as letters or whether they are simultaneously processed as numbers (i.e., in terms of access to their quantity representation). To address this question, we conducted two experiments that examined the size congruity effect (i.e., when comparisons of the physical size of numbers are affected by their numerical magnitudes) in a physical-size judgment task. Participants were presented with pairs of leet words th…

Masked identity priming reflects an encoding advantage in developing readers.

Abstract The masked priming technique is widely used to explore the early moments of letter and word identification. Although this technique is increasingly used in experiments with young readers, the mechanism in play during masked priming with early readers has not yet been fully explored. We investigated the masked priming effects from a modeling perspective; we instantiated competing theories as data models (using Bayes factors) and as a computational model (diffusion model). We carried out a masked priming experiment using identity primes with second- and fourth-grade participants, and we analyzed the data through an evidence accumulation model lens. The priming effect manifests as a s…

The effects of inter-letter spacing in visual-word recognition: Evidence with young normal readers and developmental dyslexics

Abstract Recent research has demonstrated that slight increases of inter-letter spacing have a positive impact on skilled readers' recognition of visually presented words. In the present study, we examined whether this effect generalises to young normal readers and readers with developmental dyslexia, and whether increased inter-letter spacing affects the reading times and comprehension of a short text. To that end, we conducted a series of lexical decision and continuous reading experiments in which words were presented with the default settings or with a small increase in inter-letter spacing. Increased spacing produced shorter word identification times not only with adult skilled readers…

Do Transposed-Letter Similarity Effects Occur at a Syllable Level?

One key issue for any computational model of visual word recognition is the choice of an input coding scheme for assigning letter position. Recent research has shown that transposed-letter similarity effects occur even when the transposed letters are not adjacent (caniso- casino; Perea & Lupker, 2004 , JML). In the present study we conducted two single-presentation lexical decision experiments to examine whether transposed-letter effects occur at a syllable level. We tested two types of nonwords: (1) nonwords created by transposing two internal CV syllables (PRIVEMARA; the base word is primavera, the Spanish for spring) and (2) nonwords created by transposing two adjacent bigrams that …

Does consonant–vowel skeletal structure play a role early in lexical processing? Evidence from masked priming

Published online: 02 November 2017 Is the specific consonant–vowel (CV) letter combination of a word a basic source of information for lexical access in the early stages of processing? We designed two masked priming lexical decision experiments to respond to this question by directly examining the role of CV skeletal structure in written-word recognition. To that aim, each target word was preceded by a one-letter different nonword prime that kept the same CV skeletal structure or not. We also included an identity prime as a control. Results showed faster word identification times in the CV congruent condition than in the CV incongruent condition when a consonant was replaced from the target…

Early use of phonological codes in deaf readers: An ERP study.

Previous studies suggest that deaf readers use phonological information of words when it is explicitly demanded by the task itself. However, whether phonological encoding is automatic remains controversial. The present experiment examined whether adult congenitally deaf readers show evidence of automatic use of phonological information during visual word recognition. In an ERP masked priming lexical decision experiment, deaf participants responded to target words preceded by a pseudohomophone (koral - CORAL) or an orthographic control prime (toral - CORAL). Responses were faster for the pseudohomophone than for the orthographic control condition. The N250 and N400 amplitudes were reduced fo…

Visual letter similarity effects during sentence reading: Evidence from the boundary technique

The study of how the cognitive system encodes letter identities from the visual input has received much attention in models of visual word recognition but it has typically been overlooked in models of eye movement control in reading. Here we examined how visual letter similarity affects early word processing during reading using Rayner's (1975) boundary change technique in which the parafoveal preview of the target word was either identical (e.g., frito-frito [fried]) or a one-letter-different nonword (e.g., frjto-frito vs. frgto-frito). Critically, the substituted letter in the nonword was visually similar (based on letter confusability norms) or visually dissimilar. Results showed shorter…

Consonant/vowel asymmetries in letter position coding during normal reading: Evidence from parafoveal previews in Thai

Studies have revealed that consonants and vowels serve different roles during linguistic processing. Masked transposed-letter priming effects (i.e., faster word-identification times for words preceded by a transposed-letter than substitution-letter prime) occur for consonants but not for vowels in lexical decision (Perea & Lupker, 2004). Potential differences in letter position coding for consonants and vowels during silent normal reading were investigated in Thai using the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975). Thai has a distinctive alphabetic script with vowels taking a relatively subsidiary role in relation to consonants. Parafoveal processing of nonadjacent transposed-letter effects involvi…

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 …

Communication deficits and avoidance of angry faces in children with autism spectrum disorder.

Abstract Background Understanding how emotional faces are processed is important to help characterize the social deficits in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Aims We examined: (i) whether attention is modulated by emotional facial expression; (ii) the time course of the attentional preferences (short vs. long stimulus presentation rates); and (iii) the association between attentional biases and autistic symptomatology. Method and procedures We applied a dot-probe experiment with emotional faces (happy, sad, and angry). The sample was composed of ASD children without additional language and/or intellectual impairments (n = 29) and age-matched Typically Developing (TD) children (n = 29). Outco…

Associative and semantic priming effects occur at very short stimulus-onset asynchronies in lexical decision and naming

Abstract Prior research has found significant associative/semantic priming effects at very short stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs) in experimental tasks such as lexical decision, but not in naming tasks (however, see Lukatela and Turvey, 1994 ). In this paper, the time course of associative priming effects was analyzed at several very short SOAs (33, 50, and 67 ms), using the masked priming paradigm ( Forster and Davis, 1984 ), both in lexical decision (Experiment 1) and naming (Experiment 2). The results show small—but significant—associative priming effects in both tasks. Additionally, using the masked priming procedure at the 67 ms SOA, Experiments 3 and 4, shows facilitatory priming ef…

Contextual diversity is a main determinant of word identification times in young readers.

Recent research with college-aged skilled readers by Adelman and colleagues revealed that contextual diversity (i.e., the number of contexts in which a word appears) is a more critical determinant of visual word recognition than mere repeated exposure (i.e., word frequency) (Psychological Science, 2006, Vol. 17, pp. 814-823). Given that contextual diversity has been claimed to be a relevant factor to word acquisition in developing readers, the effects of contextual diversity should also be a main determinant of word identification times in developing readers. A lexical decision experiment was conducted to examine the effects of contextual diversity and word frequency in young readers (child…

Suppression of mirror generalization for reversible letters: Evidence from masked priming

Abstract Readers of the Roman script must “unlearn” some forms of mirror generalization when processing printed stimuli (i.e., herb and herd are different words). Here we examine whether the suppression of mirror generalization is a process that affects all letters or whether it mostly affects reversible letters (i.e., b / d ). Three masked priming lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine how the cognitive system processes mirror images of reversible vs. non-reversible letters embedded in Spanish words. Repetition priming effects relative to the mirror-letter condition were substantially greater when the critical letter was reversible (e.g., idea - IDEA vs. ibea - IDEA ) than …

Corrigendum to “Electrophysiological signatures of masked transposition priming in a same-different task: Evidence with strings of letters vs. pseudoletters” [Neurosci. Lett. 515 (2012) 71–76]

wo images were inadvertently left out of the 2nd paragraph of the reviously published article. Please see corrected paragraph and mages below. In a series of behavioural experiments, Garcia-Orza et al. [10] xamined whether masked transposition priming is specific to leter processing. They employed a masked priming same-different atching task in which participants were required to press a utton if cue and target were the same and to press another utton if cue and target were different (see [15,16] for reviews f this task). A briefly presented transposed-letter masked prime as presented immediately before the target stimulus. Garciarza et al. ([10] Experiments 1–4]) found a masked transpositi…

On the flexibility of letter position coding during lexical processing: the case of Thai.

In Indo-European languages, letter position coding is particularly noisy in middle positions (e.g., judge and jugde look very similar), but not in the initial letter position (e.g., judge vs. ujdge). Here we focus on a language (Thai) which, potentially, may be more flexible with respect to letter position coding than Indo-European languages: (i) Thai is an alphabetic language which is written without spaces between words (i.e., there is a degree of ambiguity in relation to which word a given letter belongs to) and (ii) some of the vowels are misaligned (e.g., [Formula: see text]/ε:bn/ is pronounced as /bε:n/), whereas others are not (e.g., [Formula: see text]/a:p/ is pronounced as /a:p/).…

Repetition and form priming interact with neighborhood density at a brief stimulus onset asynchrony.

The relationships between repetition- and form-priming effects and neighborhood density were analyzed in two masked priming experiments with the lexical decision task. Given that form-priming effects appear to be influenced by a word's orthographic neighborhood, it is theoretically important to find out whether repetition priming also differs as a function of the word's orthographic neighborhood. Within an activation framework, repetition- and form-priming effects are just quantitatively different phenomena, whereas the two effects are qualitatively different in a serial-ordered model of lexical access (the entry-opening model). The results show that repetition- and form-priming effects wer…

Transposed-letter similarity effects in naming pseudowords: Evidence from children and adults

There is growing empirical evidence that shows that transposed-letter pseudowords (e.g., relovution) are perceptually very similar to their base words. This is a finding that has important implications for the choice of an input coding scheme in visual word recognition and naming. In the present experiment, we examined the presence of transposed-letter effects for pseudowords by using the naming task in a transparent orthography (Spanish): The pseudowords were created by transposing two letters or by replacing two letters (e.g., relovucion vs. retosucion). Since it has been suggested that transposed-letter effects may be greater for developing than for adult readers (Castles, Davis, & Forst…

Psycholinguistic variables in visual word recognition and pronunciation of European Portuguese words: a mega-study approach

An increasing number of psycholinguistic studies have adopted a megastudy approach to explore the role that different variables play in the speed and/or accuracy with which words are recognised and/or pronounced in different languages. However, despite evidence for deep and shallow orthographies, little is known about the role that several orthographic, phonological and semantic variables play in visual word recognition and word production of words from intermediate-depth languages, as European Portuguese (EP). The current study aimed to overcome this gap, by collecting lexical decision and naming data for a large pool of words selected to closely represent the diversity of the EP language.…

On the limits of familiarity accounts in lexical decision: The case of repetition effects

Recent modelling accounts of the lexical decision task have suggested that the reading system performs evidence accumulation to carry out some functions. Evidence accumulation models have been very successful in accounting for effects in the lexical decision task, including the dissociation of repetition effects for words and nonwords (facilitative for words but inhibitory for nonwords). The familiarity of a repeated item triggers its recognition, which facilitates ‘word’ responses but hampers nonword rejection. However, reports of facilitative repetition effects for nonwords with several repetitions in short blocks challenge this hypothesis and favour models based on episodic retrieval. T…

Data for: Does visual letter similarity modulate masked form priming in young readers of Arabic?

Raw data for the paper entitled "Does visual letter similarity modulate masked form priming in young readers of Arabic?"