The authors investigated how eye movements are influenced by different reading goals in participants' first (L1) and second language (L2). Participants read or studied the contents of texts while their eye movements were recorded. One group was asked to read L1 and L2 texts as they would read any expository text (informational reading). Another…

In this study, we present a new diagnostic test for dyslexia, called the Flamingo Test, inspired by the French Alouette Test. The purpose of the test is to measure students' word decoding skills and reading fluency by means of a grammatically correct but meaningless text. Two experiments were run to test the predictive validity of the Flamingo…

To have more information about the English words known by second language (L2) speakers, we ran a large-scale crowdsourcing vocabulary test, which yielded 17 million useful responses. It provided us with a list of 445 words known to nearly all participants. The list was compared to various existing lists of words advised to include in the first…

Words are processed as units. This is not as evident as it seems, given the division of the human cerebral cortex in two hemispheres and the partial decussation of the optic tract. In two experiments, we investigated what underlies the unity of foveally presented words: A bilateral projection of visual input in foveal vision, or interhemispheric…

Recent studies have shown that word frequency estimates obtained from films and television subtitles are better to predict performance in word recognition experiments than the traditional word frequency estimates based on books and newspapers. In this study, we present a subtitle-based word frequency list for Spanish, one of the most widely spoken…

Language production has been found to be lateralized in the left hemisphere (LH) for 95% of right-handed people and about 75% of left-handers. The prevalence of atypical right hemispheric (RH) or bilateral lateralization for reading and colateralization of production with word reading laterality has never been tested in a large sample. In this…

The Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM) of bilingual language processing dominates current thinking on bilingual language processing. Recently, basic tenets of the model have been called into question. First, there is little evidence for separate lexicons. Second, there is little evidence for language selective access. Third, the inclusion of…

The best established lateralized cerebral function is speech production, with the majority of the population having left hemisphere dominance. An important question is how to best assess the laterality of this function. Neuroimaging techniques such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) are increasingly used in clinical settings to…

To examine whether interhemispheric transfer during foveal word recognition entails a discontinuity between the information presented to the left and right of fixation, we presented target words in such a way that participants fixated immediately left or right of an embedded word (as in "gr*apple", "bull*et") or in the middle…

Split fovea theory proposes that when the eyes are fixated within a written word, visual information about the letters falling to the left of fixation is projected initially to the right cerebral hemisphere while visual information about the letters falling to the right of fixation is projected to the left cerebral hemisphere. The two parts of the…

It has recently been shown that interhemispheric communication is needed for the processing of foveally presented words. In this study, we examine whether the integration of information happens at an early stage, before word recognition proper starts, or whether the integration is part of the recognition process itself. Two lexical decision…

Traditional neuropsychology employs visual half-field (VHF) experiments to assess cerebral language dominance. This approach is based on the assumption that left cerebral dominance for language leads to faster and more accurate recognition of words in the right visual half-field (RVF) than in the left visual half-field (LVF) during tachistoscopic…

In this paper we review the literature on visual constraints in written word processing. We notice that not all letters are equally visible to the reader. The letter that is most visible is the letter that is fixated. The visibility of the other letters depends on the distance between the letters and the fixation location, whether the letters are…

It is not easy to comment on Dijkstra and Van Heuven's model because there are many more aspects we agree with than aspects we feel uncomfortable about. Indeed, the BIA model has played an enormous role in showing us how bilingual visual word recognition can be achieved without recurrence to the intuitively appealing--but wrong--ideas of separate,…

For over 15 years, masked phonological priming effects have been offered as evidence that phonology plays a leading role in visual word recognition. The existence of these effects--along with their theoretical implications--has, however, been disputed. The authors present three sources of evidence relevant to an assessment of the existence and…