Unlike other visual objects which are invariant to the left-right orientation, mirror letters (e.g., b and d) represent different object identities. Previous masked priming lexical decision studies have suggested that the identification of a mirror letter involves suppression of its mirror image counterpart reporting as evidence that a pseudoword…

This study analyzes the impact of certain cognitive processes on word and pseudoword reading in languages with different orthographic consistency (Spanish and Arabic) in the first year of Primary Education. The study was conducted with a group of 113 pupils from Algeria and another group of 128 pupils from Ecuador, from a middle-class background…

Learning the structure of event sequences is a ubiquitous problem in cognition and particularly in language. One possible solution is to learn a probabilistic generative model of sequences that allows making predictions about upcoming events. Though appealing from a neurobiological standpoint, this approach is typically not pursued in…

Although previous research has shown that letter position information for the first letter of a parafoveal word is encoded less flexibly than internal word beginning letters (Johnson, Perea & Rayner, 2007; White et al., 2008), it is not clear how positional encoding operates over the initial trigram in English. This experiment explored the…

Various phenomena in tachistoscopic word identification and priming (WRODS and LTRS are confused with and prime WORDS and LETTERS) suggest that position-specific channels are not used in the processing of letters in words. Previous approaches to this issue have sought alternative matching rules because they have assumed that these phenomena reveal…

Printed words that have a transposed-letter (TL) neighbor (e.g., angel has the TL neighbor angle) have been shown to be more difficult to process, in a range of paradigms, than words that do not have a TL neighbor. However, eye movement evidence suggests that this processing difficulty may occur on only a subset of trials. To investigate this…

The process of word form encoding was investigated in primed word naming and word typing with Chinese monosyllabic words. The target words shared or did not share the onset consonants with the prime words. The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was 100 ms or 300 ms. Typing required the participants to enter the phonetic letters of the target word,…

It is commonly assumed that orthographical lexical access in visual word recognition takes place in parallel, with all letters activated at the same time. In contrast, in the SERIOL model of letter-position encoding, letters fire sequentially (Whitney, 2001). I present further support for such seriality on several fronts. (1) The reasons that led…

The effect of orthographic transparency on letter position encoding was investigated using a visual search task given to skilled readers of English (a deep orthography) or Greek (a transparent orthography). Two groups of younger participants, matched for age and education, were monoscriptal in English, or biscriptal in Greek and English. Two…

We attempted to simulate the main features of letter-by-letter (LBL) dyslexia in normal readers through stimulus degradation (i.e. contrast reduction and removal of high spatial frequencies). The results showed the word length and the letter confusability effects characteristic of LBL dyslexia. However, the interaction of letter confusability and…

Bilingual reading can require more than knowing two languages. Learners must acquire also the writing conventions of their second language, which can differ in its deep mapping principles (writing system) and its visual configurations (script). We review ERP (event-related potential) and fMRI studies of both Chinese-English bilingualism and…

First grade students (n=221) were tested on measures of verbal fluency, visual attention, phonological awareness, orthographic recognition, rapid automated naming (RAN) of letters and objects, and reading. Findings indicated that word reading was directly and significantly predicted by RAN letter naming and general RAN cognitive processing time of…

Letters and words are better identified when there are fewer available choices. How do readers use choice-set restrictions? By analyzing new experimental data and previously reported data, the author shows that Bayes theorem-based models overestimate readers' use of choice-set restrictions. This result is discordant with choice-similarity models…

Phonological and metaphonological skills are explored in 97 Brazilian illiterate and semiliterate adults. A simple letter- and word-reading task was used to define the degree of illiteracy. Phonemic awareness was strongly dependent on the level of letter and word reading ability. Phonological memory was very low in illiterates and unrelated to…