Semantic diversity -- a metric that captures variations in previous contextual experience with a word -- influences children's lexical decision and reading aloud. We investigated the effects of semantic diversity and frequency on children's reading of words embedded in sentences, while eye movements were recorded. If semantic diversity and…

Two experiments explored learning, generalization, and the influence of semantics on orthographic processing in an artificial language. In Experiment 1, 16 adults learned to read 36 novel words written in novel characters. Posttraining, participants discriminated trained from untrained items and generalized to novel items, demonstrating extraction…

Two experiments assessed whether 7-year-old children activate semantic information from sub-word orthography. Children made category decisions to visually-presented words, some of which contained an embedded word (e.g., "hip" in s"hip"). In Experiment 1 children were slower and less accurate to classify words if they contained an embedded word…