This paper reports on a clinical trial evaluating outcomes of a frequency-lowering technique for adolescents and young adults with severe to profound hearing impairment. Outcomes were defined by changes in aided thresholds, speech perception, and acceptance. The participants comprised seven young people aged between 13 and 25 years. They were…

This is an account of what a teacher educator learned from using the video game Neverwinter Nights with Drax, a high school student whose reading is like that of an elementary school student. Neverwinter Nights is a role-playing adventure game that requires reading print along with other meaningful signs such as sounds, artefacts, color, maps,…

Despite an extensive literature linking individual differences in phonological processing to reading ability, some adults show normal text comprehension abilities despite poor pseudoword reading (Jackson & Doellinger (2002). "Journal of Educational Psychology," 94, 64-78). This study was undertaken to investigate differences between these…

Over the last decade, there has been increasing evidence for syllabic processing during visual word recognition. If syllabic effects prove to be independent from orthographic redundancy, this would seriously challenge the ability of current computational models to account for the processing of polysyllabic words. Three experiments are presented to…

Many studies in bilingual visual word recognition have demonstrated that lexical access is not language selective. However, research on bilingual word recognition in the auditory modality has been scarce, and it has yielded mixed results with regard to the degree of this language nonselectivity. In the present study, we investigated whether…

This article describes a study to determine whether assistive technology, specifically text-to-speech software, can be used to help students with dyslexia cope with academic texts in English. Results from the study indicated that the text-to-speech software enhances students' immediate and long-term academic reading performances. A list of…

Retrieval practice is a potent technique for enhancing learning, but how often do students practice retrieval when they regulate their own learning? In 4 experiments the subjects learned foreign-language items across multiple study and test periods. When items were assigned to be repeatedly tested, repeatedly studied, or removed after they were…

We examined whether university students who report a significant history of reading difficulties (RD; n=24) differed from university students with no history of reading difficulties (NRD; n=31) in how sentence context affects word recognition. Experiment 1 found no differences in how congruent sentence primes or syntactic manipulations of the…

Masked affix priming effects have usually been obtained for words sharing the initial affix (e.g., "reaction"-"REFORM"). However, prior evidence on masked suffix priming effects (e.g., "baker"-"WALKER") is inconclusive. In the present series of masked priming lexical decision experiments, a target word was…

This study focuses on the effect of computer-aided vocabulary learning software called "ArabCAVL" on students' vocabulary acquisition. It was hypothesized that students who use the ArabCAVL software in blended learning environment will surpass students who use traditional vocabulary learning strategies in face-to-face learning…

In this experiment, syntactic constraints on the retrieval of orthography were investigated using homophones embedded in sentence contexts. Participants typed auditorily presented sentences that included a contextually appropriate homophone that either shared part of speech with its homophone competitor (i.e., was syntactically unambiguous) or had…

In recent years, interest in reading fluency development in first language, and second and foreign language (L2/FL) settings has increased. Reading fluency, in which readers decode and comprehend at the same time, is critical to successful reading. Fluent readers are accurate and fast in their ability to recognize words, and in their use of…

Neighborhood density refers to the number of words that sound similar to a given word. Previous studies have found that neighborhood density influences the recognition of spoken words (Luce & Pisoni, 1998); however, this work has focused almost exclusively on monosyllabic words in English. To investigate the effects of neighborhood density on…

Two experiments investigated the mechanism by which listeners adjust their interpretation of accented speech that is similar to a regional dialect of American English. Only a subset of the vowels of English (the front vowels) were shifted during adaptation, which consisted of listening to a 20-min segment of the "Wizard of Oz." Compared…

This is the first study that reports the lexicality effect (i.e., words read better than nonwords) in Italian with fully transparent and methodologically well-controlled stimuli. We investigated how words and nonwords are read aloud in the Italian transparent orthography, in which there is an almost strict one-to-one correspondence between…