Contemporary theories of semantic representation posit that social experience is an important source of information for deriving meaning. However, there is a lack of behavioral evidence in support of this proposal. The aim of the present work was to test whether words' degree of social relevance, or "socialness", influences…

During language acquisition, children are tasked with the challenge of determining which words can appear in which syntactic constructions. This has been long recognized as a learnability paradox. On one hand, there are generalizations that children must learn. On the other hand, language is known for its arbitrariness, so children also need to…

Purpose: Language abilities have long been thought to be weaker in adults who stutter (AWS) compared to adults who do not stutter (AWNS). However, it is unknown whether modality affects language performance by AWS in time pressure situations. This study aimed to examine lexical access and retrieval abilities of AWS in oral and typed modes. Method:…

Skilled reading is thought to rely on well-specified lexical representations that compete during visual word recognition. The establishment of these lexical representations is assumed to be driven by phonology. To test the role of phonology, we examined the prime lexicality effect (PLE), the index of lexical competition in signing deaf (N = 28)…

Word identification accuracy is modulated by many factors including linguistic characteristics of words (frequent vs. infrequent), listening environment (noisy vs. quiet), and listener-related differences (older vs. younger). Nearly, all studies investigating these factors use high-familiarity words and noise signals that are either energetic…

When remembering over the short-term, long-term knowledge has a large effect on the number of correctly recalled items and little impact on memory for order. This is true, for example, when the effects of semantic category are examined. Contrary to what these findings suggest, Poirier et al. in 2015 proposed that memory for order relies on the…

Purpose: Knowing target location can improve adults' speech-in-speech recognition in complex auditory environments, but it is unknown whether young children listen selectively in space. This study evaluated masked word recognition with and without a pretrial cue to location to characterize the influence of listener age and masker type on the…

This study investigates how children aged two to eight years (N = 129) and adults (N = 29) use auditory and visual speech for word recognition. The goal was to bridge the gap between apparent successes of visual speech processing in young children in visual-looking tasks, with apparent difficulties of speech processing in older children from…

This study investigates the performance of adults with cerebrovascular lesion in the right hemisphere (RHL) or left hemisphere (LHL) in word reading (TLPP) and spelling (TEPP) tasks based on the dual-route models. A total of 85 adults were assessed, divided into three groups: 10 with RHL, 15 with LHL, and 60 neurologically healthy ones. The…

Objectives: The purpose of this article is to review research that has been conducted over the past five years on language development, reading skills and word learning with the use of the eye tracking machine as regards the population with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in comparison to typically developed population. Materials and methods: A…

The aim of the study is to examine the effect of sentential context on lexical ambiguity resolution in Greek adults and typically developing children. Context and word frequency are factors that can affect lexical processing, however, the role of them has not been thoroughly examined in Greek. To this aim, we assessed sentence context effects in…

Mind wandering occurs when a reader's thoughts are unrelated to the text's ideas. We examined the relation between mind wandering and readers' memory for text. More specifically, we assessed whether mind wandering inhibits the reader's development of the situation model and thus their ability to identify and recall the text's most central ideas.…

Discrimination of reversible mirrored letters (e.g., d and b) poses a challenge when learning to read as it requires overcoming "mirror invariance," an evolutionary-old perceptual tendency of processing mirror images as equivalent. The present study investigated "when," in reading development, mirror-image discrimination…

Less-skilled adult readers have been found to be limited in their awareness and use of effective reading strategies. In this study, we aimed to (a) identify the strategies used by less-skilled adult readers that best predict word reading performance on standardized reading tests and (b) identify the word reading strategies that less-skilled adult…

Purpose: An increasing number of individuals with residual or even normal contralateral hearing are being considered for cochlear implantation. It remains unknown whether the presence of contralateral hearing is beneficial or detrimental to their perceptual learning of cochlear implant (CI)--processed speech. The aim of this experiment was to…