In conversation or during reading, we sometimes find ourselves making predictions about the identity of an upcoming word or phrase. This phenomenon has been reflected in the results of laboratory experiments that show changes in eye gaze patterns or the Electroencephalogram (EEG) "prior" to encountering a predicted word. However,…

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the various neurocognitive processes concomitant to reading by attempting to identify various subtypes of reading disorders in a referred sample. Participants were 216 elementary school students in grades two through five who were given select subtests of the Woodcock Johnson-III Tests of…

A huge set of focused attention experiments show that when presented with color words printed in color, observers report the ink color faster if the carrier word is the name of the color rather than the name of an alternative color, the Stroop effect. There is also a large number (although not so numerous as the Stroop task) of so-called…

Three forced-choice perceptual word identification experiments tested the claim that transitions from positive to negative priming as a function of increasing prime duration are due to cognitive aftereffects. These aftereffects are similar in nature to perceptual aftereffects that produce a negative image due to overexposure and habituation to a…

Priming effects of ignored distractor words were investigated in a task-switching situation that allowed an orthogonal variation of priming and response compatibility between prime and probe. Across 3 experiments, the authors obtained a disordinal interaction of priming and response relation. Responding was delayed in the ignored repetition…

This article reports an error in the article "Retrieval of Incidental Stimulus-Response Associations as a Source of Negative Priming" by Rothermund et al. ("Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition," Vol 31(3) May 2005, 482-495). Table 1 (p. 484) was incorrectly typeset. The correct layout is provided. (The following…

Research supported by the U.S. Office of Education and the Center for Research in Human Learning at the University of Minnesota.

Assessed the effect of associative (response) interference on the word associations of male and female process and reactive schizophrenics in two studies that used the difference in associative disturbances between high and low interference (low and high commonality stimulus words) as the measure. Findings supported predictions from a qualitative…

Paper sets out an attempt to use the changes in implicit associative responses resulting from semantic constraints to examine some features of the associative network aroused by the perception of a complete sentence. (Author)

Research supported by grants from the National Science Foundation. (DS)

There is debate about whether preschool-age children interpret words as referring to kinds or to classes defined by shape similarity. The authors argue that the shape bias reported in previous studies is a task-induced artifact rather than a genuine word-learning strategy. In particular, children were forced to extend an object's novel label to…

Low-frequency words produce more hits and fewer false alarms than high-frequency words in a recognition task. The low-frequency hit rate advantage has sometimes been attributed to processes that operate during the recognition test (e.g., L. M. Reder et al., 2000). When tasks other than recognition, such as recall, cued recall, or associative…

In 2 experiments, the authors investigated phonologically mediated priming of preexisting and new associations in word retrieval. Young and older adults completed paired word stems with the first word that came to mind. Priming of preexisting associations occurred when word-stem pairs containing homophones (e.g., beech-s____) showed more…

To develop a coherent description of the knowledge and processes involved in skillful word recognition, a study was devised in which 16 adults participated in four related experiments. The purpose of the first experiment was to examine some basic aspects of the processing of words, pseudowords, and nonwords and to discover basic differences in…