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Skilled readers are typically most accurate at identifying words when fixating them slightly left of the central character, the so-called optimal viewing position. There are two main explanations for this effect, which are not mutually exclusive. The first claims that the optimal viewing position lies left-of-center due to the particular constraints of the human perceptual system. The second explains the effect in terms of the beginnings of words generally being more informative about word identity. The complexities of natural languages make it difficult to tease apart the relative contribution of each explanation. We explore this issue through the lens of a Bayesian cognitive model and two experiments using artificial lexicons in which we can carefully control how information is distributed across wordforms. Our results replicate previous findings and further suggest that readers may use implicit knowledge about information distribution to minimize uncertainty when targeting words.

A recent Registered Replication Report (RRR) of the development of verbal rehearsal during serial recall revealed that children verbalized at younger ages than previously thought, but did not identify sources of individual differences. Here, we use mediation analysis to reanalyze data from the 934 children ranging from 5 to 10 years old from the RRR for that purpose. From ages 5 to 7, the time taken for a child to label pictures (i.e. isolated naming speed) predicted the child's spontaneous use of labels during a visually presented serial reconstruction task, despite no need for spoken responses. For 6- and 7-year-olds, isolated naming speed also predicted recall. The degree to which verbalization mediated the relation between isolated naming speed and recall changed across development. All relations dissipated by age 10. The same general pattern was observed in an exploratory analysis of delayed recall for which greater demands are placed on rehearsal for item maintenance. Overall, our findings suggest that spontaneous phonological recoding during a standard short-term memory task emerges around age 5, increases in efficiency during the early elementary school years, and is sufficiently automatic by age 10 to support immediate serial recall in most children. Moreover, the findings highlight the need to distinguish between phonological recoding and rehearsal in developmental studies of short-term memory.

The present study investigated whether morphological processing in reading is influenced by the orthographic consistency of a language or its morphological complexity. Developing readers in Grade 3 and skilled adult readers participated in a reading aloud task in four alphabetic orthographies (English, French, German, Italian), which differ in terms of both orthographic consistency and morphological complexity. English is the least consistent, in terms of its spelling-to-sound relationships, as well as the most morphologically sparse, compared to the other three. Two opposing hypotheses were formulated. If orthographic consistency modulated the use of morphology in reading, readers of English should show more robust morphological processing than readers of the other three languages, because morphological units increase the reliability of spelling-to-sound mappings in the English language. In contrast, if the use of morphology in reading depended on the morphological complexity of a language, readers of French, German, and Italian should process morphological units in printed letter strings more efficiently than readers of English. Both developing and skilled readers of English showed greater morphological processing than readers of the other three languages. These results support the idea that the orthographic consistency of a language, rather than its morphological complexity, influences the extent to which morphology is used during reading. We explain our findings within the remit of extant theories of reading acquisition and outline their theoretical and educational implications.

This article presents the ENglish Reading Online (ENRO) project that offers data on English reading and listening comprehension from 7,338 university‐level advanced learners and native speakers of English representing 19 countries. The database also includes estimates of reading rate and seven component skills of English, including vocabulary, spelling, and grammar, as well as rich demographic and language background data. We first demonstrate high reliability for ENRO tests and their convergent validity with existing meta‐analyses. We then provide a bird's‐eye view of first (L1) and second (L2) language comparisons and examine the relative role of various predictors of reading and listening comprehension and reading speed. Across analyses, we found substantially more overlap than differences between L1 and L2 speakers, suggesting that English reading proficiency is best considered across a continuum of skill, ability, and experiences spanning L1 and L2 speakers alike. We end by providing pointers for how researchers can mine ENRO data for future studies. A one‐page Accessible Summary of this article in non‐technical language is freely available in the Supporting Information online and at https://oasis‐database.org [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this eye-tracking study, we investigated how semantics inform morphological analysis at the early stages of visual word identification in sentence reading. We exploited a feature of several derived Italian words, that is, that they can be read in a "morphologically transparent" way or in a "morphologically opaque" way according to the sentence context to which they belong. This way, each target word was embedded in a sentence eliciting either its transparent or opaque interpretation. We analyzed whether the effect of stem frequency changes according to whether the (very same) word is read as a genuine derivation (transparent context) versus as a pseudoderived word (opaque context). Analysis of the first fixation durations revealed a stem-word frequency effect in both opaque and transparent contexts, thus showing that stems were accessed whether or not they contributed to word meaning, that is, word decomposition is indeed blind to semantics. However, while the stem-word frequency effect was facilitatory in the transparent context, it was inhibitory in the opaque context, thus showing an early involvement of semantic representations. This pattern of data is revealed by words with short suffixes. These results indicate that derived and pseudoderived words are segmented into their constituent morphemes also in natural reading; however, this blind-to-semantics process activates morpheme representations that are semantically connoted.

There is broad consensus that printed complex words are identified on the basis of their constituent morphemes. This fact raises the issue of how the word identification system codes for morpheme position, hence allowing it to distinguish between words like "overhang" and "hangover", and to recognize that "preheat" is a word, whereas "heatpre" is not. Recent data have shown that suffixes are identified as morphemes only when they occur at the end of letter strings (Crepaldi, Rastle, & Davis, 2010, "Morphemes in Their Place: Evidence for Position-Specific Identification of Suffixes," "Memory & Cognition, 38", 312-321), which supports the general proposal that the word identification system is sensitive to morpheme positional constraints. This proposal leads to the prediction that the identification of free stems should occur in a position-independent fashion, given that free stems can occur anywhere within complex words (e.g., over"dress" and "dresser"). In Experiment 1, we show that the rejection time of transposed-constituent pseudocompounds (e.g., "moonhoney") is longer than that of matched control nonwords (e.g., "moonbasin"), suggesting that honey and "moon" are identified within "moonhoney", and that these morpheme representations activate the representation for the word "honeymoon". In Experiments 2 and 3, we demonstrate that the masked presentation of transposed-constituent pseudocompounds (e.g., "moonhoney") facilitates the identification of compound words ("honeymoon"). In contrast, monomorphemic control pairs do not produce a similar pattern (i.e., "rickmave" did not prime "maverick"), indicating that the effect for "moonhoney" pairs is genuinely morphological in nature. These results demonstrate that stem representations differ from affix representations in terms of their positional constraints, providing a challenge to all existing theories of morphological processing. (Contains 7 tables and 3 footnotes.)

The present paper investigates the interaction between eye movements, voice articulation and the movements of the index finger dynamically pointing to a text line in oral finger-point reading of Italian. During finger-point reading, the finger appears to be ahead of the voice most of the times, by a margin that is significantly modulated by the distribution of phrasal and prosodic units in the reading text. Eye movements replicate the same effects on a different time scale. The eye is ahead of both voice and finger by a wide margin (confirming evidence observed for English and German sentence reading), while showing a tendency to re-synchronise with voice articulation at the right edge of strong prosodic units (sentence boundaries). Our evidence suggests a multicomponent view of the time span between the eye/finger and the voice. The span is shown to be the dynamic outcome of an optimally adaptive reading strategy, resulting from the interaction between individual decoding skills, the reader's phonological buffer capacity, and the structural complexity of a reading text. Proficient readers modulate their span to compensate for the different timing between word fixation and word articulation, read faster, and dynamically adjust their processing window to the meaningful, prosodic units of a text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is generally held that noun processing is specifically sub-served by temporal areas, while the neural underpinnings of verb processing are located in the frontal lobe. However, this view is now challenged by a significant body of evidence accumulated over the years. Moreover, the results obtained so far on the neural implementation of noun and verb processing appear to be quite inconsistent. The present review briefly describes and critically re-considers the anatomo-correlative, neuroimaging, MEG, TMS and cortical stimulation studies on nouns and verbs with the aim of assessing the consistency of their results, particularly within techniques. The paper also addresses the question as to whether the inconsistency of the data could be due to the variety of the tasks used. However, it emerged that neither the different investigation techniques used nor the different cognitive tasks employed fully explain the variability of the data. In the final section we thus suggest that the main reason for the emergence of inconsistent data in this field is that the cerebral circuits underlying noun and verb processing are not spatially segregated, at least for the spatial resolution currently used in most neuroimaging studies. (Contains 5 tables and 1 figure.)

Recent masked priming experiments have brought to light a morphological level of analysis that is exclusively based on the orthographic appearance of words, so that it breaks down corner into corn- and -er, as well as dealer into deal- and -er (Rastle, Davis, & New, 2004). Being insensitive to semantic factors, this morpho-orthographic segmentation process cannot capture the morphological relationship between irregularly inflected words and their base forms (e.g., fell-fall, bought-buy); hence, the prediction follows that these words should not facilitate each other in masked priming experiments. However, the first experiment described in the present work demonstrates that fell does facilitate fall more than orthographically matched (e.g., fill) and unrelated control words (e.g., hope). Experiments 2 and 3 also show that this effect cannot be explained through orthographic sub-regularities that characterize many irregular inflections, as no priming arose when unrelated words showing the same orthographic patterns were tested (e.g., tell-tall vs. toll-tall). These results highlight the existence of a second higher-level source of masked morphological priming; we propose that this second source of priming is located at the lemma level, where inflected words (but not derived words) share their representation irrespective of orthographic regularity. (Contains 4 tables and 2 figures.)