Purpose: This experiment sought to determine whether children's increased susceptibility to nonsimultaneous masking, particularly backward masking, is evident for speech stimuli. Method: Five- to 9-year-olds and adults with normal hearing heard nonsense consonant-vowel-consonant targets. In Experiments 1 and 2, those targets were presented between…

Words presented to the right visual field (RVF) are recognized more readily than those presented to the left visual field (LVF). Whereas the attentional bias theory proposes an explanation in terms of attentional imbalance between visual fields, the attentional advantage theory assumes that words presented to the RVF are processed automatically…

Many models of spoken word recognition posit the existence of lexical and sublexical representations, with excitatory and inhibitory mechanisms used to affect the activation levels of such representations. Bottom-up evidence provides excitatory input, and inhibition from phonetically similar representations leads to lexical competition. In such a…

Research supported by grants from the United States Public Health Service and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (DS)

THE PURPOSE OF THIS RESEARCH WAS TO EXAMINE THE EFFECTS OF SEVERAL MEASURES OF WORD-RELATEDNESS ON SEVERAL VERBAL LEARNING TASKS--PRIMARILY PAIRED-ASSOCIATES LEARNING AND VERBAL DISCRIMINATION LEARNING, WITH INCIDENTAL ATTENTION GIVEN TO FREE RECALL AND SEMANTIC GENERALIZATION. THE STRATEGY WAS TO SELECT A SAMPLE OF WORD PAIRS (240 COMMON NOUNS…

Several experiments investigated the effect of word length on recognition thresholds for both familiar English words and unfamiliar pseudowords, the thresholds measured both with and without a stimulus mask. (Editor)