The Common Core State Standards emphasize the need for U.S. students to read complex texts. As a result, the level of word complexity for primary-level texts is important, particularly the dimensions of and changes in complexity between first grade and the important third-grade high-stakes testing year. In this study, we addressed word complexity…

This study explored how pre-K children process an e-book with narration through eye movements, and also the effects of visual cues on preschoolers' visual attention to text, word recognition, and comprehension. Data were collected from eight children attending a university-associated daycare center. Eye tracker was used to record the participants'…

Purpose: The probability of a child reading a word correctly is influenced by both child skills and properties of the word. The purpose of this study was to investigate child-level skills (set for variability and vocabulary), word-level properties (concreteness), word structure (mono- vs polymorphemic), and interactions between these properties…

In this study, we compared children's and adults' ability to accurately identify target words in written minimal pairs (WMPs) with graphemically similar letters while accounting for factors such as gender, similarity of the middle letter in WMPs, mono- versus dimorphemic WMPs, number of syllable, homography, and imageability. Fifty children and…

The aim of the current study was to examine the relations between reading literacy and statistical literacy of Hebrew-speaking college students (L1) compared with Arabic-speaking students whose second language (L2) is Hebrew. The contribution of reading skills to statistical literacy in L1 and L2 students and the differences between the groups,…

Semantic similarity between stimuli can lead to false memories and can also potentially cause retroactive interference (RI) for veridical memories. Here, participants first learned spatial locations for "critical" words that reliably produce false memories in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm. Next, participants centrally viewed…

In the present study, we aimed to compare reading-writing relations between first-grade Native English Speakers (NESs) and English Language Learners (ELLs). Thirty-four ELLs and 35 NESs completed measures of receptive and expressive vocabulary, lexical-level reading (word reading) and writing (spelling), and discourse-level reading (reading…

An often overlooked but fundamental issue for any comprehensive model of visual-word recognition is the representation of diacritical vowels: Do diacritical and nondiacritical vowels share their abstract letter representations? Recent research suggests that the answer is "yes" in languages where diacritics indicate suprasegmental…

Holistic processing (HP) of faces refers to the obligatory, simultaneous processing of the parts and their relations, and it emerges over the course of development. HP is manifest in a decrement in the perception of inverted versus upright faces and a reduction in face processing ability when the relations between parts are perturbed. Here,…

An important component of reading comprehension is the reader's capacity to make inferences that can maintain the coherence between propositions within the text. However, the cognitive and linguistic skills that underlie online inference making remain elusive. The authors aimed to clarify the effects of vocabulary and text comprehension on…

The orthographic choice (OC) task--requiring individuals to choose the correct spelling between a word and a pseudohomophone foil (e.g., "goat" vs. "gote")--has been used as an outcome measure of orthographic learning and as a predictor of individual differences in word reading development. Some consider the OC task a measure…

Visual word recognition is facilitated by the presence of "orthographic neighbors" that mismatch the target word by a single letter substitution. However, researchers typically do not consider "where" neighbors mismatch the target. In light of evidence that some letter positions are more informative than others, we investigate…

When too much visual stimuli is present, the phenomenon of clutter is known to degrade an individual's perception across a variety of domains, ranging from completing search tasks incorrectly, to decreasing reading speed when letters are too close together. However, research is lacking as to whether the negative effects of clutter impact learning…

The New Word Hunter project sought to engage families of Year 1 children with the aim of extending their vocabularies beyond everyday language. Early vocabulary development has been linked to later performance in reading comprehension, as well as to socio-economic status. This project sought to recruit families from two diverse school communities…

For the most part, the effects of lexical-distributional properties of words on visual word recognition are well-established. More uncertainty remains, however, about the influence of these properties on lexical processing for nonwords. The work presented here investigates the mechanisms that guide nonword processing through an analysis of lexical…