Past work has suggested that L1 readers retrieve idioms (i.e., "spill the tea") directly vs. matched literal controls ("drink the tea") following unbiased contexts, whereas L2 readers process idioms more compositionally. However, it is unclear whether this occurs when a figuratively or literally biased context…

The hypothesis that known words can serve as anchors for discovering new words in connected speech has computational and empirical support. However, evidence for how the bootstrapping effect of known words interacts with other mechanisms of lexical acquisition, such as statistical learning, is incomplete. In 3 experiments, we investigated the…

Successful word recognition requires that listeners attend to differences that are phonemic in the language while also remaining flexible to the variation introduced by different voices and accents. Previous work has demonstrated that American-English-learning 19-month-olds are able to balance these demands: although one-off one-feature…

Do you know what happens in mind when we encounter a novel word while reading a newspaper, a paragraph or a short story? Via eye tracking technique, this study aimed to gather clues about how our mind reacts to an unknown word while we read in another language by examining word familiarity effects on eye movements during EFL reading. After a…

The present study examined visual word recognition processes in Hebrew (a Semitic language) among beginning learners whose first language (L1) was either Semitic (Arabic) or Indo-European (e.g. English). To examine if learners, like native Hebrew speakers, exhibit morphological sensitivity to root and word-pattern morphemes, learners made an…

Situations in which the name of a person is perceived as familiar but does not trigger recall of pertinent semantic knowledge are common in daily life. In current connectionist models of person recognition, such "familiar-only" experiences reflect supra-threshold activation at person-identity nodes but subthreshold activation at nodes…

The present study sheds light on the interplay between lexical and decision processes in the lexical decision task by exploring the effects of lexical decision difficulty on semantic priming effects. In 2 experiments, we increased lexical decision difficulty by either using transposed letter wordlike nonword distracters (e.g., JUGDE; Experiment 1)…

In this study, we determined cognitive structures and misconceptions about basic ecological concepts by using "word association" tests on secondary school students, age between 12-14 years. Eighty-nine students participated in this study. Before WAT was generated, basic ecological concepts that take place in the secondary science…

We examined whether French third- and fifth-grade children rely on morphemes when recognizing words and whether this reliance depends on word familiarity. We manipulated the presence of bases and suffixes in words and pseudowords to compare their contribution in a lexical decision task. Both bases and suffixes facilitated word reading accuracy and…

The pseudoword effect is the finding that pseudowords (i.e., rare words or pronounceable nonwords) give rise to more hits and false alarms than words. Using the retrieving effectively from memory (REM) model of recognition memory, we tested a familiarity-based account of the pseudoword effect: Specifically, the pseudoword effect arises because…

Two experiments combined a spatial cueing manipulation (valid vs. invalid spatial cues) with a stimulus repetition manipulation (repeated vs. nonrepeated) in order to assess the hypothesis that familiar items need less spatial attention than less familiar ones. The magnitude of the effect of cueing on reading aloud time for items that were…

A sample of junior students majoring in translation was enrolled in an Arabization course. The students received direct instruction in word formation processes in English and Arabic such as compounding, derivation, back formation, conversion, blends, clipping, acronyms and neologisms. Focus was on similarities and differences between English and…

According to Smith and Nelson [Smith, L.E., Nelson, C.E., 1985. "International intelligibility of English: directions and resources." "World Englishes" 3, 333-342.], "intelligibility" refers to word/utterance recognition, whereas "comprehensibility" is the understanding of word/utterance meaning. This study…

An experiment exploring Zimbabwean bilingual readers' use of background knowledge in reading comprehension is reported. In contrast to previous results, the bilingual participants of these experiments do use context to improve comprehension on some passages. (15 references) (Author/LB)