Role In Word Recognition Research Articles

The role of orthographic and phonological processing during reading Chinese sentences: Evidence from eye movements.

The role of phonological and orthographic processing and their time course during lexical processing and sentence reading remain controversial. By adopting a misspelled-characters disruption paradigm and eye-tracking technique, we manipulated the writing for the first characters of two-character target words to investigate the relative role of orthographic and phonological processing on word recognition in Chinese reading. There are four conditions: (a) correct character, (b) misspelled character with a stroke missing, (c) misspelled homographic character, and (d) misspelled homophonic character. The results showed that homophonic errors caused more disruptions than other conditions in the early (first-pass reading times) and later (total reading time) stages of lexical processing during Chinese reading. Homographic errors and omitted stroke errors lead to equal disruptions at the early stage of word recognition, but homographic errors cause more disruptions at the later stage. These results suggest that orthography plays a dominant role in word recognition during Chinese reading, whereas phonology plays a weaker and more limited role. The direct access and dual-rote hypothesis may well explain the mechanism of lexical processing in Chinese reading.

The shifting role of fluid reasoning in reading among children evaluated for ADHD

Children with attentional difficulties are more likely than their peers to experience challenges in basic reading skills, including phonemic decoding and word recognition. Such challenges may require reliance on higher-order cognitive functions such as fluid reasoning (Gf) to attain reading proficiency. The present study sought to clarify the role of Gf in phonemic decoding and word recognition among children—in grades 1–7 (n = 156)—being evaluated for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Effects of Gf were examined in relation to crystallized knowledge (Gc). Results indicated that Gf exerted a direct effect onto phonemic decoding in early grades (grades 1–2) but not in later grades (grades 3–7). Gf also exerted an indirect effect onto phonemic decoding—through Gc—in later grades (grades 3–7) but not in early grades (grades 1–2). Finally, Gf exerted an indirect effect onto word recognition through phonemic decoding in grades 1–4 but not in grades 5–7. Altogether, findings show that Gf plays a direct role in younger children’s phonemic decoding and an indirect role in word recognition (through Gc) in later grades, suggesting a shift in Gf’s role across grade levels. Although findings need replication in longitudinal research, current results have implications for both typical and atypical reading development.

Learning Multi-Level Dependencies for Robust Word Recognition

Robust language processing systems are becoming increasingly important given the recent awareness of dangerous situations where brittle machine learning models can be easily broken with the presence of noises. In this paper, we introduce a robust word recognition framework that captures multi-level sequential dependencies in noised sentences. The proposed framework employs a sequence-to-sequence model over characters of each word, whose output is given to a word-level bi-directional recurrent neural network. We conduct extensive experiments to verify the effectiveness of the framework. The results show that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin and they also suggest that character-level dependencies can play an important role in word recognition. The code of the proposed framework and the major experiments are publicly available1.

The functional relevance of dorsal motor systems for processing tool nouns– evidence from patients with focal lesions

This study asks whether lesions in different parts of the brain have different effects on the processing of words typically used to refer to objects with and without action affordances, for example tools and animal-related nouns. A cohort of neurological patients with focal lesions participated in a lexical decision paradigm where nouns semantically related to tools, foods and animals were presented along with matched pseudo-words. Differences in semantic features between the categories were confirmed using extensive semantic ratings whereas all semantic word categories were matched for relevant psycholinguistic variables. In a data-driven region of interest analysis, lesions in dorsal pre- and postcentral grey and white matter areas were associated to specific performance deficits for tool nouns when compared to animal nouns. In contrast, patients with lesions primarily affecting perisylvian inferior-frontal and/or temporal regions presented similar deficits across all semantic word categories tested and likewise a group of age and education matched healthy control participants did not show any category specific differences. These findings falsify brain language models denying the fronto-parietal cortex’ role in word recognition and semantic understanding. They are best accounted for by frameworks that acknowledge a role of sensorimotor cortex in the semantic processing of action-related words.

Penggunaan Media Word Webs Dalam Pembelajaran Kosa Kata Bahasa Inggris Di Sdnn 01 Suruh Tasikmadu Karanganyar

English learning for children called English for Young Learners (TEYL) is developing in various parts of the world, especially in developing countries including Indonesia. This policy began in Indonesia since the enactment of the 1994 Curriculum, and its implementation continues to be increasingly necessary. This is related to the government's efforts to prepare reliable and quality students, who will be able to compete at the national and international levels. English has become a very important language in the international community. Therefore, everyone is expected to be able to learn, master and understand English well. In Indonesia, English occupies an important priority as the first foreign language that must be studied and mastered by students and has been taught in schools ranging from kindergarten to university level. In learning English, there are four (4) language skills that must be learned by students, namely listening, speaking, reading, and writing. One of the important language skills to be learned by students is speaking. One element of language that needs to be improved to support speaking skills is vocabulary. Vocabulary plays an important role in word recognition. The more English vocabulary that is owned and mastered by students, the better they are at understanding various learning materials delivered in English. Mastery of a large and extensive English vocabulary can also improve students' ability to communicate using English. The introduction of English vocabulary in SDN 01 Suruh Tasikmadu Karanganyar can use learning media that is fun, easy and effective. The learning media is Word Webs. The Word Webs media has the benefit of increasing students' knowledge of English vocabulary and strongly supports speaking skills. Word Webs learning media is a learning media that can be used in the teaching and learning process of English especially Vocabulary. Through this Community Service Activity or Pengabdian Kepada Masyarakat, learning English using Word Webs media at SDN 01 Suruh Karanganyar feels more fun and memorable. This will make students feel enthusiastic and happy in learning English provided by using Word Webs media. This media can also help teachers in teaching English vocabulary to support students' speaking skills with fun.

Evidence for Separate Contributions of High and Low Spatial Frequencies during Visual Word Recognition.

Previous studies have shown that different spatial frequency information processing streams interact during the recognition of visual stimuli. However, it is a matter of debate as to the contributions of high and low spatial frequency (HSF and LSF) information for visual word recognition. This study examined the role of different spatial frequencies in visual word recognition using event-related potential (ERP) masked priming. EEG was recorded from 32 scalp sites in 30 English-speaking adults in a go/no-go semantic categorization task. Stimuli were white characters on a neutral gray background. Targets were uppercase five letter words preceded by a forward-mask (#######) and a 50 ms lowercase prime. Primes were either the same word (repeated) or a different word (un-repeated) than the subsequent target and either contained only high, only low, or full spatial frequency information. Additionally within each condition, half of the prime-target pairs were high lexical frequency, and half were low. In the full spatial frequency condition, typical ERP masked priming effects were found with an attenuated N250 (sub-lexical) and N400 (lexical-semantic) for repeated compared to un-repeated primes. For HSF primes there was a weaker N250 effect which interacted with lexical frequency, a significant reversal of the effect around 300 ms, and an N400-like effect for only high lexical frequency word pairs. LSF primes did not produce any of the classic ERP repetition priming effects, however they did elicit a distinct early effect around 200 ms in the opposite direction of typical repetition effects. HSF information accounted for many of the masked repetition priming ERP effects and therefore suggests that HSFs are more crucial for word recognition. However, LSFs did produce their own pattern of priming effects indicating that larger scale information may still play a role in word recognition.

Formation of Orthographic Representations in Spanish Dyslexic Children: The Role of Syllable Complexity and Frequency.

Recent studies have suggested that Spanish children with dyslexia have difficulty storing orthographic representations of new words. But given that the syllable plays an important role in word recognition in Spanish, it is possible that the formation of orthographic representations is influenced by the characteristics of the syllables that make up the words. The objective of this study was to determine whether syllabic frequency and syllabic complexity influence orthographic learning in children with dyslexia. We compared the performance of a group of dyslexic children with that of a group of typical readers on a task that involved reading short and long pseudowords six times; we manipulated the frequency and complexity of the syllables from which the pseudowords were constructed. The results showed that dyslexic children do not benefit from syllabic simplicity or frequency when it comes to storing orthographic representations as the length effect in the dyslexic group remained was unchanged after repeated readings, regardless of stimulus characteristics. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The role of word recognition, oral reading fluency and listening comprehension in the simple view of reading: a study in an intermediate depth orthography

Empirical research has provided evidence for the simple view of reading across a variety of orthographies, but the role of oral reading fluency in the model is unclear. Moreover, the relative weight of listening comprehension, oral reading fluency and word recognition in reading comprehension seems to vary across orthographies and schooling years. This study aims to examine the direct effects of these three variables on reading comprehension and to test for the existence of indirect effects of word recognition and listening comprehension on reading comprehension via oral reading fluency in European Portuguese, an orthography of intermediate depth. A sample of 264 students was assessed at the end of grades 2 and 4. Structural equation modeling analyses indicated that listening comprehension, word recognition and oral reading fluency predicted reading comprehension in both grade 2 and grade 4. Moreover, the three variables measured in grade 2 predicted later reading comprehension in grade 4. Listening comprehension was always the strongest predictor. Oral reading fluency mediated the relationship between word recognition and reading comprehension, but it was not a mediator variable in the relationship between listening comprehension and reading comprehension. These findings indicate that, similarly to what has been found for other orthographies, the simple view of reading is a valid framework to account for reading comprehension variability in European Portuguese and that interventions to increase reading comprehension levels should focus on word recognition, fluency, and, especially, listening comprehension.

Outer Hair Cell Damage: A Completely Different Listening Experience

Outer Hair Cell Damage: A Completely Different Listening Experience

Phonological contribution during visual word recognition in child readers. An intermodal priming study in Grades 3 and 5

This study investigated the phonological contribution during visual word recognition in child readers as a function of general reading expertise (third and fifth grades) and specific word exposure (frequent and less‐frequent words). An intermodal priming in lexical decision task was performed. Auditory primes (identical and unrelated) were used in order to directly activate phonological codes independently of orthographic processing. Overall, the results revealed a widespread phonological priming effect in both grades. There was a significant interaction between grade, priming condition and frequency, revealing that the impact of frequency on identity priming differed between grades. In third grade, the results indicated that the priming effect was greater for less‐frequent than for frequent words. In fifth grade, priming effects were similar for both frequent and less‐frequent words. These findings indicate that print and speech processing systems are interconnected in young readers. Moreover, phonological codes play an important role in word recognition throughout reading development.

Is the Motor System Necessary for Processing Action and Abstract Emotion Words? Evidence from Focal Brain Lesions.

Neuroimaging and neuropsychological experiments suggest that modality-preferential cortices, including motor- and somatosensory areas, contribute to the semantic processing of action related concrete words. Still, a possible role of sensorimotor areas in processing abstract meaning remains under debate. Recent fMRI studies indicate an involvement of the left sensorimotor cortex in the processing of abstract-emotional words (e.g., “love”) which resembles activation patterns seen for action words. But are the activated areas indeed necessary for processing action-related and abstract words? The current study now investigates word processing in two patients suffering from focal brain lesion in the left frontocentral motor system. A speeded Lexical Decision Task on meticulously matched word groups showed that the recognition of nouns from different semantic categories – related to food, animals, tools, and abstract-emotional concepts – was differentially affected. Whereas patient HS with a lesion in dorsolateral central sensorimotor systems next to the hand area showed a category-specific deficit in recognizing tool words, patient CA suffering from lesion centered in the left supplementary motor area was primarily impaired in abstract-emotional word processing. These results point to a causal role of the motor cortex in the semantic processing of both action-related object concepts and abstract-emotional concepts and therefore suggest that the motor areas previously found active in action-related and abstract word processing can serve a meaning-specific necessary role in word recognition. The category-specific nature of the observed dissociations is difficult to reconcile with the idea that sensorimotor systems are somehow peripheral or ‘epiphenomenal’ to meaning and concept processing. Rather, our results are consistent with the claim that cognition is grounded in action and perception and based on distributed action perception circuits reaching into modality-preferential cortex.

Noun/verb distinction in English stress homographs: an ERP study.

Sensitivity to speech rhythm, especially the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, is an important aspect of language acquisition and comprehension from infancy through adulthood. In English, a strong correlation exists between speech rhythm and grammatical class. This property is well illustrated by a particular group of noun/verb homographs that are spelled the same but are pronounced with a lexical stress on the first syllable when used as a noun or on the second syllable when used as a verb. The purpose of this study was to further examine the neural markers of speech rhythm and its role in word recognition. To this end, event-related brain potentials were recorded while participants listened to spoken sentences containing a stress homograph either in a noun or a verb position. The rhythmic structure of the stress homographs was manipulated so that they were pronounced with a stress pattern that either matched or mismatched their grammatical class. Results of cluster-based permutation tests on the event-related brain potentials revealed larger negativities over the centrofrontal scalp regions when the stress homographs were mispronounced, in line with previous studies on lexical ambiguity resolution. In addition, differences between rhythmically unexpected nouns and verbs could be seen as early as 200 ms, suggesting that listeners are sensitive to statistical properties of their language rhythm. Together, these results support the hypothesis that information about speech rhythm is rapidly integrated during speech perception and contributes to lexical retrieval.

The effects of orthographic transparency and familiarity on reading Hebrew words in adults with and without dyslexia.

The current study examined the effects of transparency and familiarity on word recognition in adult Hebrew dyslexic readers with a phonological processing deficit as compared to typical readers. We measured oral reading response time and accuracy of single nouns in several conditions: diacritics that provide transparent but less familiar information and vowel letters that increase orthographic transparency without compromise familiarity. In line with former studies with adult dyslexics, Hebrew-speaking adults with dyslexia were significantly slower than controls. However, both dyslexic and typical readers read unpointed words faster when vowel letters were present, indicating that they may benefit from increase in orthographic transparency, when the graphemic representations are familiar. Only dyslexics read pointed words slower than unpointed words and were more sensitive to word frequency. In unpointed words, only typical readers benefitted from the reduced competition of orthographic neighbors of longer words. Results indicate that both orthographic transparency and familiarity play an important role in word recognition. Dyslexics are impaired in decoding of smaller units and are more sensitive to reduction in the familiarity of words.

Processing of Alternated and Inverse Fonts in Word Recognition by Native and Nonnative Speakers of English

This study investigated the perceptibility of visually altered stimuli in word recognition by English- and Korean-speaking adults. Forty four college students from the U.S. and South Korea participated in this study. The orthographic depth hypothesis and the psycholinguistic grain size theory guided this study. Three different fonts (i.e., normal, alternated, and inverse fonts) and two lexical features (i.e., words and nonwords) were used in a lexical decision task. The results showed that native English speakers were less sensitive to the visually noisy shapes (i.e., alternated and inverse fonts) than the Korean participants. It suggests that the psycholinguistic unit of the first language plays a role in word recognition beyond the language dominance (i.e., first language vs. foreign language).

Combined ERP/fMRI evidence for early word recognition effects in the posterior inferior temporal gyrus

Two brain regions with established roles in reading are the posterior middle temporal gyrus and the posterior fusiform gyrus (FG). Lesion studies have also suggested that the region located between them, the posterior inferior temporal gyrus (pITG), plays a central role in word recognition. However, these lesion results could reflect disconnection effects since neuroimaging studies have not reported consistent lexicality effects in pITG. Here we tested whether these reported pITG lesion effects are due to disconnection effects or not using parallel Event-related Potentials (ERP)/functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies. We predicted that the Recognition Potential (RP), a left-lateralized ERP negativity that peaks at about 200–250 msec, might be the electrophysiological correlate of pITG activity and that conditions that evoke the RP (perceptual degradation) might therefore also evoke pITG activity. In Experiment 1, twenty-three participants performed a lexical decision task (temporally flanked by supraliminal masks) while having high-density 129-channel ERP data collected. In Experiment 2, a separate group of fifteen participants underwent the same task while having fMRI data collected in a 3T scanner. Examination of the ERP data suggested that a canonical RP effect was produced. The strongest corresponding effect in the fMRI data was in the vicinity of the pITG. In addition, results indicated stimulus-dependent functional connectivity between pITG and a region of the posterior FG near the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) during word compared to nonword processing. These results provide convergent spatiotemporal evidence that the pITG contributes to early lexical access through interaction with the VWFA.

Pathways to Reading: The Role of Oral Language in the Transition to Reading.

What is the role of oral language in reading competence during the transition to school? Is oral language in preschool best conceptualized as vocabulary knowledge or as more comprehensive language including grammar, vocabulary, and semantics? These questions were examined longitudinally using 1,137 children from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. Children were followed from age 3 through 3rd grade, and the results suggest that oral language conceptualized broadly plays both a direct and an indirect role in word recognition during the transition to school and serves as a better foundation for early reading skill than does vocabulary alone. Implications of these findings are discussed in terms of both theoretical models of early reading and practical implications for policy and assessment.

TEST OF THE PHONOLOGICAL RECODING HYPOTHESIS USING A LETTER-DELAY TASK

In some English words is a silent letter in the letter strings, e.g., PSALM, This type of word provides room to manipulate phonological similarity against the words with a nonsilent letter in the corresponding position, e.g., PASTA, to test the phonological recoding hypothesis. Letter strings excluding the silent letter or the sounding letter, e.g., _salm and a phonological condition, _asta as an orthographic condition, were presented. A “psalm-type word” was processed faster than “pasta-type word,” indicating that phonology plays a leading role in word recognition.

Phonologic Mediation is Fundamental to Reading: Evidence from Beginning Readers

Three tasks were employed to investigate the role of assembled phonology in beginning readers. In two proofreading tasks, children had more trouble finding pseudohomophone misspellings (stimuli with phonology identical to that of a word) than control misspellings (stimuli that do not share their phonology with a word). In a lexical-decision task, they had more trouble deciding that pseudohomophone misspellings were non-words than deciding that control misspellings were non-words. Finally, in a semantic-categorization task, children had more trouble rejecting pseudohomophone misspellings as a member of a designated category than rejecting control misspellings. Differences between more and less advanced readers occurred, but they need not be attributed to differential use of phonology in word recognition. Instead, they were explained in terms of a difference between reader groups in spelling-verification efficiency. The results of the present studies on beginning reading parallel studies on skilled reading by Van Orden et al. (1992). The main conclusion was that assembled phonology plays an important role in word recognition in beginning readers.

Interactions between sentence context and word frequencyinevent-related brainpotentials

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded as subjects silently read a set of unrelated sentences. The ERP responses elicited by open-class words were sorted according to word frequency and the ordinal position of the eliciting word within its sentence. We observed a strong inverse correlation between sentence position and the amplitude of the N400 component of the ERP. In addition, we found that less frequent words were associated with larger N400s than were more frequent words, but only if the eliciting words occurred early in their respective sentences. We take this interaction between sentence position and word frequency as evidence that frequency does not play a mandatory role in word recognition, but can be superseded by the contextual constraint provided by a sentence.

Behavioral or hemispheric asymmetry: Is there a default option?

The presence of acuity gradients as a moderating variable in hemifield research is not in question. Their importance as a determinant of hemifield differences is unclear, however. The major issues are as follows. First, do vertical displays provide an appropriate control for the acuity gradient? Second, do the initial letters of a word play a critical role in word recognition, either in information-theoretic terms or because the lexicon is itself organized around access codes based on the initial letter or letters of words? Third, do behavioral and hemispheric accounts provide equally attractive explanations of Task Level × Visual Field interactions? Fourth, if the two accounts are equally attractive on empirical grounds, which is to be preferred? Each of these issues is addressed in this reply to M. P. Bryden's (1986, Brain and Cognition, 5, 362–368) and J. Hellige's (1986, Brain and Cognition, 5, 369–376) comments on our article (K. Kirsner & S. Schwartz 1986, Brain and Cognition, 5, 354–361).