Recent research suggests that there is a processing distinction between consonants and vowels in visual-word recognition. Here we conjointly examine the time course of consonants and vowels in processes of letter identity and letter position assignment. Event related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read words and pseudowords in…

We report the results of an fMRI investigation of the neural bases of written language comprehension (reading) and production (spelling). Both tasks were examined in the same individuals, allowing greater precision in establishing the relationship between the neural underpinnings of these two cognitive functions. Also examined was the relationship…

Right-edge boundary tones have earlier been found to restrict syntactic processing by closing a clause for further integration of incoming words. The role of left-edge intonation, however, has received little attention to date. We show that Swedish left-edge boundary tones selectively facilitate the on-line processing of main clauses, the…

This study investigates outcomes of deliberate learning on vocabulary acquisition in a second language (L2). Acquisition of 48 pseudowords was measured using the lexical decision task with visually presented stimuli. The experiments drew on form priming, masked repetition priming, and automatic semantic priming procedures. Data analyses revealed a…

The nature of word recognition difficulties in developmental dyslexia is still a topic of controversy. We investigated the contribution of phonological processing deficits and uncertainty to the word recognition difficulties of dyslexic children by mathematical diffusion modeling of visual and auditory lexical decision data. The first study showed…

Do the production and interpretation of patterns of plural forms in noun-noun compounds reveal the workings of innate constraints that govern morphological processing? The results of previous studies on compounding have been taken to support a number of important theoretical claims: first, that there are fundamental differences in the way that…

A central feature of auditory STM is its item-limited processing capacity. We investigated whether auditory STM capacity correlated with regional gray and white matter in the structural MRI images from 74 healthy adults, 40 of whom had a prior diagnosis of developmental dyslexia whereas 34 had no history of any cognitive impairment. Using…

This cross-sectional study examines the importance of English phonological and orthographic processing skills to English word reading and spelling in 3 groups of younger (8-9 years) and older (11-12 years) children from different language backgrounds: English monolingual, English first language (L1)-Mandarin second language (L2), and Mandarin…

This study examines the relationship between complex oral language and phonological awareness in the preschool years. Specifically, the authors investigate the relationship between concurrent measures of oral narrative structure (based on measures of both story retell and generation), and measures of blending and elision in a sample of 89 children…

In this study we compared the effects of two types of form-focused instruction (FFI) on second language (L2) learning and their potential contributions to the development of different types of L2 knowledge. Both types of instruction were pre-emptive in nature, that is planned and teacher generated. In Integrated FFI attention to form was embedded…

Two experiments tested whether Russian-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) are sensitive to gender agreement when performing a gender decision task. In Experiment 1, the presence of overt gender agreement between verbs and/or adjectival modifiers and postverbal subject nouns memory was varied. In Experiment 2, agreement…

This dissertation investigates how knowledge of phonological generalizations influences speech perception, with a particular focus on evidence that phonological processing is autonomous from (rather than interactive with) auditory processing. A model is proposed in which auditory cue constraints and markedness constraints interact to determine a…

Three experiments explored online recognition in a nonspeech domain, using a novel experimental paradigm. Adults learned to associate abstract shapes with particular melodies, and at test they identified a played melody's associated shape. To implicitly measure recognition, visual fixations to the associated shape versus a distractor shape were…

Research investigating hemispheric asymmetries in meaning selection using homophonic homographs (e.g., "bank"), suggests that the left hemisphere (LH) quickly selects contextually relevant meanings, whereas the right hemisphere (RH) maintains a broader spectrum of meanings including those that are contextually irrelevant (e.g., Faust & Chiarello,…

According to the body-specificity hypothesis, people associate positive things with the side of space that corresponds to their dominant hand and negative things with the side corresponding to their nondominant hand. Our aim was to find out whether this association holds also true for a response time study using linguistic stimuli, and whether…