ORCID Profile
0000-0002-3429-0240
Current Organisations
University of Adelaide
,
Swinburne University of Technology
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Research Topics
In Research Link Australia (RLA), "Research Topics" refer to ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes. These topics are either sourced from ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes listed in researchers' related grants or generated by a large language model (LLM) based on their publications.
Top 5 Research Topics
ANZSRC Field of Research (FoR)
Cognitive Science | Cognitive Science not elsewhere classified | Neurocognitive Patterns and Neural Networks | Computational Linguistics | Learning, Memory, Cognition And Language | Cognitive Science Not Elsewhere Classified | Linguistic Processes (incl. Speech Production and Comprehension) | Educational Psychology
ANZSRC Socio-Economic Objective (SEO)
Expanding Knowledge in Psychology and Cognitive Sciences | Learner and Learning Processes | Hearing, Vision, Speech and Their Disorders | Learner and Learning Achievement | Behavioural and cognitive sciences |
Related Links
Publications
Using electrophysiological correlates of early semantic priming to test models of reading aloud
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 28-03-2022
DOI: 10.1038/S41598-022-09279-6
Abstract: The speed at which semantics is accessed by words with consistent (simple) and inconsistent (difficult) spelling–sound correspondences can be used to test predictions of models of reading aloud. Dual-route models that use a word-form lexicon predict consistent words may access semantics before inconsistent words. The Triangle model, alternatively, uses only a semantic system and no lexicons. It predicts inconsistent words may access semantics before consistent words, at least for some readers. We tested this by examining event-related potentials in a semantic priming task using consistent and inconsistent target words with either unrelated/related or unrelated/nonword primes. The unrelated/related primes elicited an early effect of priming on the N1 with consistent words. This result supports dual-route models but not the Triangle model. Correlations between the size of early priming effects between the two prime groups with inconsistent words were also very weak, suggesting early semantic effects with inconsistent words were not predictable by in idual differences. Alternatively, there was a moderate strength correlation between the size of the priming effect with consistent and inconsistent words in the related/unrelated prime group on the N400. This offers a possible locus of in idual differences in semantic processing that has not been previously reported.
Linguistic difficulties in language and reading development constrain skilled adult reading
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 09-2000
DOI: 10.3758/BF03198408
Abstract: This study investigated whether the quality and specification of phonological representations in early language development would predict later skilled reading. Two perceptual identification experiments were performed with skilled readers. In Experiment 1, spelling difficulties in Grade 1 were used as a proxy measure for poorly specified representations in early language development. In Experiment 2, difficulties in perceiving and representing liquid and nasalized phonemes in final consonant clusters were used for the same purpose. Both experiments showed that words that were more likely to develop underspecified lexical representations in early language development remained more difficult in skilled reading. This finding suggests that early linguistic difficulties in speech perception and structuring of lexical representations may constrain the long-term organization and dynamics of the skilled adult reading system. The present data thus challenge the assumption that skilled reading can be fully understood without taking into account linguistic constraints acting upon the beginning reader.
Testing a computational account of category-specific deficits
Publisher: MIT Press - Journals
Date: 05-1999
Abstract: Patients displaying mild symptoms of Alzheimer's disease sometimes have more difficulty naming items from an artifact than from a natural kind category others displaying more severe symptoms almost always have more difficulty naming items from a natural kind than from an artifact category. This paper examined a computational model of this double dissociation (Devlin, Gonnerman, Andersen, & Seidenberg, 1998). Four basic tests of the model were proposed: The model should be able to generalize to new exemplars, the model should be expandable such that training sets of a realistic size can be used, the model's performance should not be unduly affected by small changes in architecture, and the learning algorithm should produce results that are not inconsistent with any major underlying factor of semantic organization. The model was found to be deficient in all four areas. Results reported from the model may therefore have been idiosyncratic to the model and not reflect general properties of a real semantic system.
Phonology Matters: The Phonological Frequency Effect in Written Chinese
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 05-2000
Abstract: Does phonology play a role in silent reading? This issue was addressed in Chinese. Phonology effects are less expected in Chinese than in alphabetical languages like English because the basic units of written Chinese (the characters) map directly into units of meaning (morphemes). This linguistic property gave rise to the view that phonology could be bypassed altogether in Chinese. The present study, however, shows that this is not the case. We report two experiments that demonstrate pure phonological frequency effects in processing written Chinese. Characters with a high phonological frequency were processed faster than characters with a low phonological frequency, despite the fact that the characters were matched on orthographic (printed) frequency. The present research points to a universal phonological principle according to which phonological information is routinely activated as a part of word identification. The research further suggests that part of the classic word-frequency effect may be phonological.
What do you mean by that?! An electrophysiological study of emotional and attitudinal prosody
Publisher: Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Date: 15-07-2015
Investigating the nature of children's altruism using a social humanoid robot
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 03-2020
Identical Words are Read Differently in Different Languages
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 09-2001
Abstract: It is hypothesized that written languages differ in the preferred grain size of units that emerge during reading acquisition. Smaller units (graphemes, phonemes) are thought to play a dominant role in relatively consistent orthographies (e.g., German), whereas larger units (bodies, rhymes) are thought to be more important in relatively inconsistent orthographies (e.g., English). This hypothesis was tested by having native English and German speakers read identical words and nonwords in their respective languages (zoo-Zoo, sand-Sand, etc.). Although the English participants exhibited stronger body-rhyme effects, the German participants exhibited a stronger length effect for words and nonwords. Thus, identical items were processed differently in different orthographies. These results suggest that orthographic consistency determines not only the relative contribution of orthographic versus phonological codes within a given orthography, but also the preferred grain size of units that are likely to be functional during reading.
Working memory load affects early affective responses to concrete and abstract words differently: Evidence from ERPs
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 22-01-2019
DOI: 10.3758/S13415-018-00686-9
Abstract: Early posterior negativity (EPN) is an early-occurring, event-related, potential that is elicited by pictures and words that have highly arousing characteristics. Whilst EPN has been found with words presented in isolation several times, different types of words have shown quite different effects across different types of tasks. One possible reason for this is that memory and attentional demands may affect the way semantic features of words are processed, and this may modulate EPN. This was investigated in a silent reading task using abstract and concrete words of negative and neutral valence and a dual phonological working memory task to manipulate memory load. The results showed that abstract but not concrete words elicited EPN, and this may have affected downstream processing. Further analyses examining alpha desynchronization showed that negative concrete words appeared to be significantly affected by the memory load manipulation, unlike negative abstract words. These results provide evidence that the processing of features in negative concrete words is more affected by working memory and attentional demands than the processing of features in negative abstract words, and this may be responsible for the failure of negative concrete words to elicit EPN in this study. Thus, the extent to which words elicit EPN appears to be dependent on both their semantic representations and competing cognitive processes. These results provide a potential explanation for some of the differences that have been reported in previous experiments as well as insight into how memory and attention can affect the processing of the semantic features of words.
Priming the rules of spelling
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 03-2003
Syllable Timing and Pausing: Evidence from Cantonese
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 03-2009
Abstract: We examined the relationship between the acoustic duration of syllables and the silent pauses that follow them in Cantonese. The results showed that at major syntactic junctures, acoustic plus silent pause durations were quite similar for a number of different syllable types whose acoustic durations differed substantially. In addition, it appeared that CV: syllables, which had the longest acoustic duration of all syllable types that were examined, were also the least likely to have silent pauses after them. These results suggest that cross-language differences between the probability that silent pauses are used at major syntactic junctures might potentially be explained by the accuracy at which timing slots can be assigned for syllables, rather than more complex explanations that have been proposed.
Neural mechanisms underlying semantic and orthographic processing in Chinese-English bilinguals
Publisher: Ovid Technologies (Wolters Kluwer Health)
Date: 08-2003
DOI: 10.1097/00001756-200308260-00003
Abstract: Brain activation underlying language processing in Chinese-English bilinguals was examined using fMRI in an orthographic search and a semantic classification task. In both tasks, brain areas activated by Chinese characters and English words were very similar to tasks examining Chinese reading using Chinese pinyin (an alphabetic Chinese script) and Chinese characters. However, the degree of later-alization was different, with English words (second language) causing much more right hemisphere activation than Chinese characters (native language). These differences support the hypothesis that second language usage causes more right hemisphere activation than native language usage.
Prosody and lemma selection
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 07-2005
DOI: 10.3758/BF03193081
Abstract: In three picture-naming experiments, we examined the effect of prosodic context on the synonyms people use to name pictures in Mandarin Chinese. This was done without time pressure. The results showed that when monosyllabic and bisyllabic synonyms (e.g., hen/chicken) were embedded in a context of pictures with either bisyllabic or trisyllabic names, participants gave bisyllabic responses to the synonyms more often than they did in a condition without such a context. The difference was very similar in magnitude in both the bisyllabic and trisyllabic contextual conditions. These results suggest that people are biased toward using synonyms that have numbers of syllables equal or similar to those of the prosodic context. If it is assumed that prosodic effects originate at a stage of processing beyond the lemma level, then this suggests either that multiple phonological forms of synonyms can be activated or that there is feedback from prosodic processing that influences lemma selection.
Toddlers prefer to help familiar people
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 10-2018
DOI: 10.1016/J.JECP.2018.05.009
Abstract: Young children's willingness to spontaneously help others is the subject of a large body of research investigating the ontogeny of moral behavior and thought. A developing debate centers around the extent to which social factors influence the desire to help. Familiarity with the person needing help is one such factor that varies across many studies but has not been systematically investigated. In Experiment 1, we show that toddlers were significantly more likely to assist a person on an out-of-reach clothespin task when they had previously become familiar with that person. Moreover, and in contrast to previous work, we found that becoming familiar with a person increases helpfulness only toward that person and does not transfer to an unknown person. We further demonstrate, in Experiment 2A, that children were equally likely to approach and take a sticker from an experimenter with whom they were familiar or unfamiliar-thereby ruling out wariness of strangers as the key driver for familiarity effects in Experiment 1. Moreover, in Experiment 2B, we show that children were more likely to help the previously unfamiliar partner (from Experiment 2A) after the partner gave the child the sticker. We conclude that familiarity is an ecologically important social influencer of toddler helping behavior.
The neural substrate of analogical reasoning: An fMRI study
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 10-2003
DOI: 10.1016/S0926-6410(03)00167-8
Abstract: This study investigated the anatomical substrate of analogical reasoning using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In the study, subjects performed a verbal analogy task (e.g., soldier is to army as drummer is to band) and, to control for activation caused by purely semantic access, a semantic judgment task. Significant activation differences between the verbal analogy and the semantic judgment task were found bilaterally in the prefrontal cortex (right BA 11/BA 47 and left BA45), the fusiform gyrus, and the basal ganglia left lateralized in the postero-superior temporal gyrus (BA 22) and the (para) hippoc al region and right lateralized in the anterior cingulate. The role of these areas in analogical reasoning is discussed.
A phoneme-grapheme feedback consistency effect
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 06-2003
DOI: 10.3758/BF03196497
Abstract: Recent studies examining the feedback consistency effect have been criticized for poor item selection (Peereman, Content, & Bonin, 1998). In the present study, an experiment was run with a new set of items, in which feedback consistency was manipulated at a phoneme-grapheme level. The results suggested that participants responded faster to feedback-consistent words than to feedback-inconsistent words. This was despite the feedback-consistent and feedback-inconsistent word groups' being matched on many other dimensions, including word frequency and subjective orthographic frequency. These results may differ from those of previous studies, since previous studies in English have measured feedback consistency at the rime-body level.
When silent letters say more than a thousand words: An implementation and evaluation of CDP++ in French
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 04-2014
Neural basis of the non-attentional processing of briefly presented words
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 11-02-2003
DOI: 10.1002/HBM.10096
A Computational and Empirical Investigation of Graphemes in Reading
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 14-03-2013
DOI: 10.1111/COGS.12030
Abstract: It is often assumed that graphemes are a crucial level of orthographic representation above letters. Current connectionist models of reading, however, do not address how the mapping from letters to graphemes is learned. One major challenge for computational modeling is therefore developing a model that learns this mapping and can assign the graphemes to linguistically meaningful categories such as the onset, vowel, and coda of a syllable. Here, we present a model that learns to do this in English for strings of any letter length and any number of syllables. The model is evaluated on error rates and further validated on the results of a behavioral experiment designed to examine ambiguities in the processing of graphemes. The results show that the model (a) chooses graphemes from letter strings with a high level of accuracy, even when trained on only a small portion of the English lexicon (b) chooses a similar set of graphemes as people do in situations where different graphemes can potentially be selected (c) predicts orthographic effects on segmentation which are found in human data and (d) can be readily integrated into a full-blown model of multi-syllabic reading aloud such as CDP++ (Perry, Ziegler, & Zorzi, 2010). Altogether, these results suggest that the model provides a plausible hypothesis for the kind of computations that underlie the use of graphemes in skilled reading.
Rules versus statistics in reading aloud: New evidence on an old debate
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 10-01-0021
Developmental dyslexia and the dual route model of reading: Simulating individual differences and subtypes
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 04-2008
DOI: 10.1016/J.COGNITION.2007.09.004
Abstract: Developmental dyslexia was investigated within a well-understood and fully specified computational model of reading aloud: the dual route cascaded model (DRC [Coltheart, M., Rastle, K., Perry, C., Langdon, R., & Ziegler, J.C. (2001). DRC: A dual route cascaded model of visual word recognition and reading aloud. Psychological Review, 108, 204-256.]). Four tasks were designed to assess each representational level of the DRC: letter level, orthographic lexicon, phonological lexicon, and phoneme system. The data showed no single cause of dyslexia, but rather a complex pattern of phonological, phonemic, and letter processing deficits. Importantly, most dyslexics had deficits in more than one domain. Subtyping analyses also suggested that both the phonological and surface dyslexics almost always had more than a single underlying deficit. To simulate the reading performance for each in idual with the DRC, we added noise to the model at a level proportional to the underlying deficit(s) of each in idual. The simulations not only accounted fairly well for in idual reading patterns but also captured the different dyslexia profiles discussed in the literature (i.e., surface, phonological, mixed, and mild dyslexia). Thus, taking into account the multiplicity of underlying deficits on an in idual basis provides a parsimonious and accurate description of developmental dyslexia. The present work highlights the necessity and merits of investigating dyslexia at the level of each in idual rather than as a unitary disorder.
It’s the words you use and how you say them: electrophysiological correlates of the perception of imitated masculine speech
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 30-06-2022
Do current connectionist learning models account for reading development in different languages?
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 04-2004
DRC: A dual route cascaded model of visual word recognition and reading aloud.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 2001
DOI: 10.1037/0033-295X.108.1.204
Abstract: This article describes the Dual Route Cascaded (DRC) model, a computational model of visual word recognition and reading aloud. The DRC is a computational realization of the dual-route theory of reading, and is the only computational model of reading that can perform the 2 tasks most commonly used to study reading: lexical decision and reading aloud. For both tasks, the authors show that a wide variety of variables that influence human latencies influence the DRC model's latencies in exactly the same way. The DRC model simulates a number of such effects that other computational models of reading do not, but there appear to be no effects that any other current computational model of reading can simulate but that the DRC model cannot. The authors conclude that the DRC model is the most successful of the existing computational models of reading.
A position-sensitive stroop effect: Further evidence for a left-to-right component in print-to-speech conversion
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 09-1999
DOI: 10.3758/BF03210835
Abstract: In the classical Stroop effect, response times for naming the color in which a word is printed are affected by the presence of semantic, phonological, or orthographic relationships between the stimulus word and the response word. We show that color naming responses are faster when the printed word shares a phoneme with the color name to be produced than when it does not, in conditions where there is no semantic relationship between the printed word and the color name. This result is compatible with a variety of computational models of reading. However, we also found that these effects are much larger when it is the first phoneme that the stimulus and response share than when it is the last. Our data are incompatible with computational models of reading in which the computation of phonology from print is purely parallel. The dual route cascaded model computational model of reading, which has a lexical route that operates in parallel and a nonlexical route that operates serially letter by letter, successfully simulates this position-sensitive Stroop effect. The model also successfully simulates the "onset effect" in masked priming (Forster & Davis, 1991) and the interaction between the regularity effect and the position in a word of a grapheme-phoneme irregularity (Rastle & Coltheart, 1999b)--effects which, we argue, arise for the same reason as the position-sensitive Stroop effect we report.
Relationships between receptive vocabulary in English and Cantonese proficiency among five-year-old Hong Kong Kindergarten children
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 30-09-2013
The DRC model of visual word recognition and reading aloud: An extension to German
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-2000
Graphemic parsing and the basic orthographic syllable structure
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 04-2013
Reading Orthographically Strange Nonwords: Modelling Backup Strategies in Reading
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 13-02-2018
Graphemes are used when reading: Evidence from Monte Carlo simulation using word norms from mega-studies
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 07-04-2023
DOI: 10.1177/17470218221086533
Abstract: Recently, Chetail ( Journal of Memory and Language, 2020) has claimed there is no strong evidence that multi-letter graphemes are used in reading tasks with proficient adult readers, with most studies being statistically weak or having confounds in the stimuli used. Here, I used Monte Carlo simulation with data from reading mega-studies to examine the extent to which the number of multi-letter graphemes matters in words when letter length is held constant. This was done by simulating thousands of experiments using different sets of items for each of a small number of comparisons (e.g., words with only single-letter graphemes versus words with one multi-letter grapheme). The results showed that words with two multi-letter graphemes tended to cause slower reaction times than words with one or no multi-letter graphemes, with effects found in both naming and lexical decision tasks. Interestingly, when words with no multi-letter graphemes were compared with words with one multi-letter grapheme, the differences were much weaker. Simulations of naming results using two computer models, the connectionist dual-process (CDP) model and the dual-route cascaded (DRC) model, showed only CDP predicted this pattern. Since CDP learns simple associations between graphemes and phonemes whereas DRC uses a set of grapheme–phoneme rules, this suggests that the results may have been caused by simple associations between spelling and sound being relatively easy to learn with words with one compared with two multi-letter graphemes. More generally, the results suggest that graphemes are used when reading, but they often produce relatively weak effects and thus differences in some studies may not have been found due to a lack of power.
Phonotactic constraints: Implications for models of oral reading in Russian.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 2016
DOI: 10.1037/XLM0000203
Abstract: The present article investigates how phonotactic rules constrain oral reading in the Russian language. The pronunciation of letters in Russian is regular and consistent, but it is subject to substantial phonotactic influence: the position of a phoneme and its phonological context within a word can alter its pronunciation. In Part 1 of the article, we analyze the orthography-to-phonology and phonology-to-phonology (i.e., phonotactic) relationships in Russian monosyllabic words. In Part 2 of the article, we report empirical data from an oral word reading task that show an effect of phonotactic dependencies on skilled reading in Russian: humans are slower when reading words where letter-phoneme correspondences are highly constrained by phonotactic rules compared with those where there are few or no such constraints present. A further question of interest in this article is how computational models of oral reading deal with the phonotactics of the Russian language. To answer this question, in Part 3, we report simulations from the Russian dual-route cascaded model (DRC) and the Russian connectionist dual-process model (CDP++) and assess the performance of the 2 models by testing them against human data.
Cross-language computational investigation of the length effect in reading aloud.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 2002
An eye on animacy and intention
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 03-06-2016
Modelling reading development through phonological decoding and self-teaching: implications for dyslexia
Publisher: The Royal Society
Date: 19-01-2014
Abstract: The most influential theory of learning to read is based on the idea that children rely on phonological decoding skills to learn novel words. According to the self-teaching hypothesis, each successful decoding encounter with an unfamiliar word provides an opportunity to acquire word-specific orthographic information that is the foundation of skilled word recognition. Therefore, phonological decoding acts as a self-teaching mechanism or ‘built-in teacher’. However, all previous connectionist models have learned the task of reading aloud through exposure to a very large corpus of spelling–sound pairs, where an ‘external’ teacher supplies the pronunciation of all words that should be learnt. Such a supervised training regimen is highly implausible. Here, we implement and test the developmentally plausible phonological decoding self-teaching hypothesis in the context of the connectionist dual process model. In a series of simulations, we provide a proof of concept that this mechanism works. The model was able to acquire word-specific orthographic representations for more than 25 000 words even though it started with only a small number of grapheme–phoneme correspondences. We then show how visual and phoneme deficits that are present at the outset of reading development can cause dyslexia in the course of reading development.
Effects of a mirror on young children’s transgression in a gift‐delay task
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 27-11-2020
DOI: 10.1111/BJDP.12312
Abstract: While the development of self-recognition in a mirror by toddlers is well documented, less is known about how the presence of a mirror affects young children's behaviour. Here, we explored how the presence of a mirror affected 2.5- to 3.5-year-olds' behaviour in a gift-delay task. Behaviour was assessed for a five-minute test period during which children sat in front of a gift bag that was not to be touched until an experimenter returned. Transgressive behaviour by adults is reduced in the presence of a mirror, so we hypothesized that children faced with a mirror would be less likely to touch the gift than children tested without a mirror. We found that the mirror reduced transgressions in children starting from around 3 years of age. We conclude that the presence of a mirror facilitated self-monitoring in 3-year-old children, such that deviations from a behavioural standard are noticed and corrected immediately. Statement of contribution What is already known on the subject? Children's self-recognition in a mirror has been well documented. Adults' behaviour can be affected by the presence of a mirror. There is a lack of research investigating how the presence of a mirror affects young children's behaviour. What does this study add? We show that the presence of a mirror decreases young children's likelihood to transgress in a gift-delay task. This effect appears to emerge at around three years of age. These findings raise interesting questions regarding the development of self-awareness and how it relates to other mechanisms.
Reflections on the first decade of Dialogues in Human Geography and the road ahead
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 03-2020
Testing predictions about the processing of word stress in reading using event-related potentials
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 07-11-2018
fMRI evidence for the automatic phonological activation of briefly presented words
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 07-2004
Understanding the complexity of computational models through optimization and sloppy parameter analyses: The case of the Connectionist Dual-Process model
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 13-02-2023
Abstract: A major strength of computational cognitive models is their capacity to accurately predict empirical data. However, challenges in understanding how complex models work and the risk of overfitting have often been addressed by trading off predictive accuracy with model simplification. Here, we introduce state-of-the-art model analysis techniques to show how a large number of parameters in a cognitive model can be reduced into a smaller set that is simpler to understand and can be used to make more constrained predictions with. As a test case, we created different versions of the Connectionist Dual-Process model (CDP) of reading aloud whose parameters were optimized on seven different databases. The results showed that CDP was not overfit and could predict a large amount of variance across those databases. Indeed, the quantitative performance of CDP was higher than that of previous models in this area. Moreover, sloppy parameter analysis, a mathematical technique used to quantify the effects of different parameters on model performance, revealed that many of the parameters in CDP have very little effect on its performance. This shows that the dynamics of CDP are much simpler than its relatively large number of parameters might suggest. Overall, our study shows that cognitive models with large numbers of parameters do not necessarily overfit the empirical data and that understanding the behavior of complex models is more tractable using appropriate mathematical tools. The same techniques could be applied to many different complex cognitive models whenever appropriate datasets for model optimization exist.
Nested incremental modeling in the development of computational theories: The CDP+ model of reading aloud.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 2007
A dissociation between orthographic awareness and spelling production
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 03-2002
DOI: 10.1017/S0142716402000036
Abstract: In this study, two nonword spelling and two orthographic awareness experiments were used to examine people's production and awareness of sound–spelling relationships. The results of the nonword spelling experiments suggest that, in general, people use phoneme–grapheme sized relationships when spelling nonwords. Alternatively, the results of the orthographic awareness experiments suggest that, under some circumstances, people can use larger sized sound–spelling relationships when judging how frequently subsyllabic relationships occur. Together the results suggest that there is a dissociation between sound–spelling production and sound–spelling awareness tasks, and the size of the sound–spelling relationships that people use varies under different tasks and task conditions.
Examining the N400m in affectively negative sentences: A magnetoencephalography study
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 20-01-2016
DOI: 10.1111/PSYP.12601
Abstract: Magnetoencephalography was used to examine the effect on the N400m of reading words that create emotional violations in sentences. The beginnings of the sentences were affectively negative and were completed with either a negative congruous, positive incongruous, or neutral incongruous adjective (e.g., "My mother was killed and I felt bad/great/normal"). The task conditions were also manipulated to favor semantic over affective processing. Compared to the sentences with the congruous negative adjectives, the results of sensor space analysis showed that there was an N400m effect with the sentences with the neutral but not positive adjectives, despite both types of sentences containing an emotional violation. Source localization results showed a similar pattern where the sentences with the incongruous positive versus congruous negative adjectives showed no significant N400m effect in the temporal and frontal areas examined, but the sentences with the incongruous neutral versus incongruous positive adjectives in the temporal areas did, particularly the left middle temporal gyrus. These results suggest that (a) the N400m effect was likely to be caused by the incongruous neutral adjectives being comparatively harder to integrate into a negative emotional context than the incongruous positive ones, (b) emotional context created by the negative sentence stems caused deeper semantic processing of the incongruous positive adjectives to be bypassed, and (c) negative affective context was generated from reading the sentences even in task conditions where it has not been generated with isolated words.
CDP++.Italian: Modelling Sublexical and Supralexical Inconsistency in a Shallow Orthography
Publisher: Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Date: 16-04-2014
Additive and Interactive Effects of Stimulus Degradation: No Challenge for CDP+
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 2009
DOI: 10.1037/A0013738
Abstract: S. O'Malley and D. Besner (2008) showed that additive effects of stimulus degradation and word frequency in reading aloud occur in the presence of nonwords but not in pure word lists. They argued that this dissociation presents a major challenge to interactive computational models of reading aloud and claimed that no currently implemented model is able to simulate additive effects in these conditions. In the current article, it is shown that the connectionist dual process model (CDP+) can simulate these effects because its nonlexical route is thresholded. The authors present a series of simulations showing that CDP+ can not only simulate the precise dissociation observed by O'Malley and Besner but more generally can produce additive effects for a wide range of parameter combinations and different sets of items. The nonlexical route of CDP+ was not modified post hoc to deal with the effects of stimulus quality, but it had been thresholded for principled reasons before it was known that these effects existed. Together, the effects of stimulus quality on word frequency do not challenge CDP+ but rather provide unexpected support for its architecture and processing dynamics.
What Is Going on with Visual Attention in Reading and Dyslexia? A Critical Review of Recent Studies
Publisher: MDPI AG
Date: 10-01-2022
Abstract: This critical review examined current issues to do with the role of visual attention in reading. To do this, we searched for and reviewed 18 recent articles, including all that were found after 2019 and used a Latin alphabet. Inspection of these articles showed that the Visual Attention Span task was run a number of times in well-controlled studies and was typically a small but significant predictor of reading ability, even after potential covariation with phonological effects were accounted for. A number of other types of tasks were used to examine different aspects of visual attention, with differences between dyslexic readers and controls typically found. However, most of these studies did not adequately control for phonological effects, and of those that did, only very weak and non-significant results were found. Furthermore, in the smaller studies, separate within-group correlations between the tasks and reading performance were generally not provided, making causal effects of the manipulations difficult to ascertain. Overall, it seems reasonable to suggest that understanding how and why different types of visual tasks affect particular aspects of reading performance is an important area for future research.
Beyond single syllables: Large-scale modeling of reading aloud with the Connectionist Dual Process (CDP++) model
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 09-2010
DOI: 10.1016/J.COGPSYCH.2010.04.001
Abstract: Most words in English have more than one syllable, yet the most influential computational models of reading aloud are restricted to processing monosyllabic words. Here, we present CDP++, a new version of the Connectionist Dual Process model (Perry, Ziegler, & Zorzi, 2007). CDP++ is able to simulate the reading aloud of mono- and disyllabic words and nonwords, and learns to assign stress in exactly the same way as it learns to associate graphemes with phonemes. CDP++ is able to simulate the monosyllabic benchmark effects its predecessor could, and therefore shows full backwards compatibility. CDP++ also accounts for a number of novel effects specific to disyllabic words, including the effects of stress regularity and syllable number. In terms of database performance, CDP++ accounts for over 49% of the reaction time variance on items selected from the English Lexicon Project, a very large database of several thousand of words. With its lexicon of over 32,000 words, CDP++ is therefore a notable ex le of the successful scaling-up of a connectionist model to a size that more realistically approximates the human lexical system.
Beyond the Two-Strategy Model of Skilled Spelling: Effects of Consistency, Grain Size, and Orthographic Redundancy
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 02-2004
DOI: 10.1080/02724980343000323
Abstract: Most models of spelling assume that people rely on two procedures when engaging in spelling: a lexical look-up procedure that retrieves spellings in their entirety, and a nonlexical procedure that constructs spellings with a set of phoneme-grapheme rules. In the present research, we investigated whether larger sized subsyllabic relationships also play a role in spelling, and how they compare to small-sized phoneme-grapheme relationships. In addition, we investigated whether purely orthographic units can explain some of the variance typically attributed to the mapping between sound and spelling. To do this, we ran five spelling experiments, two using real words and three using nonwords. Results from the experiments showed that there were independent contributions of both phoneme-grapheme and larger sized subsyllabic sound–spelling relationships, although the effect of phoneme-grapheme-sized relationships was always stronger and more reliable than larger sized subsyllabic sound–spelling relationships. Purely orthographic effects were also shown to affect word spelling, but no significant effects were found with nonword spelling. Together, the results support the hypothesis that a major constraint on spelling comes from phoneme-grapheme-sized relationships.
Speed of lexical and nonlexical processing in French: The case of the regularity effect
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 12-2003
DOI: 10.3758/BF03196556
Abstract: Words with irregular spelling-sound correspondences are read aloud more slowly than words with regular spelling-sound correspondences. This so-called regularity effect is modulated by word frequency, with low-frequency words showing larger costs than do high-frequency words. Because French has more regular spelling-to-sound correspondences than English, we expected a different pattern in French than in English. This was indeed the case, since regularity effects were obtained for both high- and low-frequency words in French. We further showed that a French implementation of the dual-route cascaded model could not account for this pattern. In additional simulations, we investigated whether this failure was due to lexical processes being too fast (leaving little time for the nonlexical route to interfere) or nonlexical processes being too slow. The results showed that only speeding up the nonlexical route allowed the model to capture the data. This suggests that the delayed phonology assumption that characterizes nonlexical processing in the original model needs to be abandoned in a more regular orthography.
A consonant-vowel priming effect in nonword spelling
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 2002
How predictable is spelling? Developing and testing metrics of phoneme-grapheme contingency
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 08-2002
DOI: 10.1080/02724980143000640
Abstract: Prior research has purported to show that words with infrequent phoneme-grapheme correspondences are more difficult to spell than words with frequent phoneme-grapheme correspondences. Defining exactly what a phoneme-grapheme relationship is, however, is not necessarily straightforward. There are a number of different assumptions that can be made. In this study, we developed four metrics of sound-spelling contingency based on all monosyllabic English words, including those with complex morphology. These metrics differed in the extent to which they included assumptions about spelling. The psychological reality of these different metrics was evaluated against data from a large-scale study of skilled adult spelling and a nonword spelling experiment. The results suggest that when spelling, people are sensitive to positional information, morphological status, vowel type, and a number of more idiosyncratic constraints.
On the nature of phonological assembly: Evidence from backward masking
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-2002
Understanding Dyslexia Through Personalized Large-Scale Computational Models
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 07-02-2019
Abstract: Learning to read is foundational for literacy development, yet many children in primary school fail to become efficient readers despite normal intelligence and schooling. This condition, referred to as developmental dyslexia, has been hypothesized to occur because of deficits in vision, attention, auditory and temporal processes, and phonology and language. Here, we used a developmentally plausible computational model of reading acquisition to investigate how the core deficits of dyslexia determined in idual learning outcomes for 622 children (388 with dyslexia). We found that in idual learning trajectories could be simulated on the basis of three component skills related to orthography, phonology, and vocabulary. In contrast, single-deficit models captured the means but not the distribution of reading scores, and a model with noise added to all representations could not even capture the means. These results show that heterogeneity and in idual differences in dyslexia profiles can be simulated only with a personalized computational model that allows for multiple deficits.
Developmental dyslexia in different languages: Language-specific or universal?
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 11-2003
DOI: 10.1016/S0022-0965(03)00139-5
Abstract: Most of the research on developmental dyslexia comes from English-speaking countries. However, there is accumulating evidence that learning to read English is harder than learning to read other European orthographies (Seymour, Aro, & Erskine, 2003). These findings therefore suggest the need to determine whether the main English findings concerning dyslexia can be generalized to other European orthographies, all of which have less irregular spelling-to-sound correspondences than English. To do this, we conducted a study with German- and English-speaking children (n=149) in which we investigated a number of theoretically important marker effects of the reading process. The results clearly show that the similarities between dyslexic readers using different orthographies are far bigger than their differences. That is, dyslexics in both countries exhibit a reading speed deficit, a nonword reading deficit that is greater than their word reading deficit, and an extremely slow and serial phonological decoding mechanism. These problems were of similar size across orthographies and persisted even with respect to younger readers that were at the same reading level. Both groups showed that they could process larger orthographic units. However, the use of this information to supplement grapheme-phoneme decoding was not fully efficient for the English dyslexics.
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