Network science uses mathematical techniques to study complex systems such as the phonological lexicon (Vitevitch, 2008). The phonological network consists of a "giant component" (the largest connected component of the network) and "lexical islands" (smaller groups of words that are connected to each other, but not to the giant…

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…

Adelman, Marquis, Sabatos-DeVito, and Estes (2013) collected word naming latencies from 4 participants who read 2,820 words 50 times each. Their recommendation and practice was that R2 targets set for models should take into account subject idiosyncrasies as replicable patterns, equivalent to a subjects-as-fixed-effects assumption. In light of an…

Compared to words that are new to a discourse, repeated words are produced with reduced acoustic prominence. Although these effects are often attributed to priming in the production system, the locus of the effect within the production system remains unresolved because, in natural speech, repetition often involves repetition of referents and…

Two studies investigated differences in the comprehension and production of words in 2-year-old children and adults. Study 1 compared children's speaking and understanding of the names of 12 novel objects presented over three weekly sessions. Study 2 tested adults' performance under similar training and testing conditions over two sessions. The…

Recent research has shown contextual diversity (i.e., the number of passages in which a given word appears) to be a reliable predictor of word processing difficulty. It has also been demonstrated that word-frequency has little or no effect on word recognition speed when accounting for contextual diversity in isolated word processing tasks. An…

The present study investigated whether the recognition of spoken words is influenced by how predictable they are given their syntactic context and whether listeners assign more weight to syntactic predictability when acoustic-phonetic information is less reliable. Syntactic predictability was manipulated by varying the word order of past…

Serial attention models of eye-movement control during reading were evaluated in an eye-tracking experiment that examined how lexical activation combines with visual information in the parafovea to affect word skipping (where a word is not fixated during first-pass reading). Lexical activation was manipulated by repetition priming created through…

Judgments of learning (JOLs) are sometimes influenced by factors that do not impact actual memory performance. One recent proposal is that perceptual fluency during encoding affects metamemory and is a basis of metacognitive illusions. In the present experiments, participants identified aurally presented words that contained inter-spliced silences…

This study investigates how newly learned words are integrated into the first-language lexicon using masked priming. Two lexical decision experiments are reported, with the aim of establishing whether newly learned words behave like real words in a masked form priming experiment. If they do, they should show a prime lexicality effect (PLE), in…

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…

Distraction during encoding has long been known to disrupt later memory performance. Contrary to this long-standing result, we show that detecting an infrequent target in a dual-task paradigm actually improves memory encoding for a concurrently presented word, above and beyond the performance reached in the full-attention condition. This absolute…

An important question in research on eye movements in reading is whether word frequency and word predictability have additive or interactive effects on fixation durations. A fair number of studies have reported only additive effects of the frequency and predictability of a target word on reading times on that word, failing to show significant…

This experiment investigated whether individual differences in written language proficiency among university students predict the early stages of lexical retrieval tapped by the masked form priming lexical decision task. To separate the contributions of sublexical facilitation and lexical competition to masked form priming, the effects of prime…

In perception, divided attention refers to conditions in which multiple stimuli are relevant to an observer. To measure the effect of divided attention in terms of perceptual capacity, we introduce an extension of the simultaneous-sequential paradigm. The extension makes predictions for fixed-capacity models as well as for unlimited-capacity…