Research on recognition of complex words has primarily focused on affixational complexity in concatenative languages. This dissertation investigates both templatic and affixational complexity in Hebrew, a templatic language, with particular focus on the role of the root and template morphemes in recognition. It also explores the role of morphology…

Reading researchers and theorists are sharply divided as to how meaning is obtained from the printed word. Three current explanations are that (1) meaning is accessed directly, without any intermediate processes; (2) meaning is accessed only through an intermediate phonemic stage; and (3) both direct access and phonemic mediation can occur. To…

Five experiments are described that detail both the structure of lexical representations accessed in visual word recognition and the method of parsing words in order to access these representations. The results support a system of lexical access that is not mediated by phonological encoding. (SW)

French sentences with a long ambiguous word just before a target phoneme led to faster reaction times than did sentences with a short unambigous word just before the target phoneme. (Author/SW)

A study examined the differences in the appreciation of language ambiguity as represented in the word play of children aged 6 through 11 years. In six weekly play sessions, students were read stories containing many lexical ambiguities and pictures and were invited to verbalize and to draw similar ambiguities. Criteria necessary to the…