ORCID Profile
0000-0002-4581-3297
Current Organisation
Macquarie University
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Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 09-04-2015
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 26-10-2016
DOI: 10.3758/S13423-016-1182-7
Abstract: Lexical competition processes are widely viewed as the hallmark of visual word recognition, but little is known about the factors that promote their emergence. This study examined for the first time whether sleep may play a role in inducing these effects. A group of 27 participants learned novel written words, such as banara, at 8 am and were tested on their learning at 8 pm the same day (AM group), while 29 participants learned the words at 8 pm and were tested at 8 am the following day (PM group). Both groups were retested after 24 hours. Using a semantic categorization task, we showed that lexical competition effects, as indexed by slowed responses to existing neighbor words such as banana, emerged 12 h later in the PM group who had slept after learning but not in the AM group. After 24 h the competition effects were evident in both groups. These findings have important implications for theories of orthographic learning and broader neurobiological models of memory consolidation.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 18-01-2020
DOI: 10.1007/S11881-019-00189-3
Abstract: Learning to read in most alphabetic orthographies requires not only the acquisition of simple grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) but also the acquisition of context-sensitive GPCs, where surrounding letters change a grapheme’s pronunciation. We aimed to explore the use and development of simple GPCs (e.g. a ➔ /æ/) and context-sensitive GPCs (e.g. [w]a ➔ /ɔ/, as in “swan” or a[l][d ] ➔ /o:/, as in “bald”) in pseudoword reading. Across three experiments, English- and German-speaking children in grades 2–4 read aloud pseudowords, where vowel graphemes had different pronunciations according to different contexts (e.g. “hact”, “wact”, “hald”). First, we found that children use context-sensitive GPCs from grade 2 onwards, even when they are not explicitly taught. Second, we used a mathematical optimisation procedure to assess whether children’s vowel responses can be described by assuming that they rely on a mix of simple and context-sensitive GPCs. While the approach works well for German adults (Schmalz et al. in Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 26 , 831–852, 2014), we found poor model fits for both German- and English-speaking children. Additional analyses using an entropy measure and data from a third experiment showed that children’s pseudoword reading responses are variable and likely affected by random noise. We found a decrease in entropy across grade and reading ability across all conditions in both languages. This suggests that GPC knowledge becomes increasingly refined across grades 2–4.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 26-04-2018
DOI: 10.1007/S41114-018-0012-9
Abstract: We present possible observing scenarios for the Advanced LIGO, Advanced Virgo and KAGRA gravitational-wave detectors over the next decade, with the intention of providing information to the astronomy community to facilitate planning for multi-messenger astronomy with gravitational waves. We estimate the sensitivity of the network to transient gravitational-wave signals, and study the capability of the network to determine the sky location of the source. We report our findings for gravitational-wave transients, with particular focus on gravitational-wave signals from the inspiral of binary neutron star systems, which are the most promising targets for multi-messenger astronomy. The ability to localize the sources of the detected signals depends on the geographical distribution of the detectors and their relative sensitivity, and $$90\\%$$ 90 % credible regions can be as large as thousands of square degrees when only two sensitive detectors are operational. Determining the sky position of a significant fraction of detected signals to areas of 5– $$20~\\mathrm {deg}^2$$ 20 deg 2 requires at least three detectors of sensitivity within a factor of $$\\sim 2$$ ∼ 2 of each other and with a broad frequency bandwidth. When all detectors, including KAGRA and the third LIGO detector in India, reach design sensitivity, a significant fraction of gravitational-wave signals will be localized to a few square degrees by gravitational-wave observations alone.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 2010
DOI: 10.1037/A0019178
Abstract: A number of computational models have been developed over the last 2 decades that are remarkably successful at explaining the process of translating print into sound. Nevertheless, 2 of the most successful computational accounts on the table fail to simulate the results from factorial experiments reported in this article in which university students read aloud letter strings that varied in terms of spelling-sound regularity and lexicality (regular words vs. exception words vs. nonwords) and stimulus quality (bright vs. dim). Skilled readers yielded additive effects of regularity and stimulus quality and additive effects of lexicality and stimulus quality on both RT and errors when nonwords were mixed with words. When only words appeared in the list, there was an interaction in which exception words were less affected by low stimulus quality than regular words were no existing account anticipates or explains these results. We advance a hypothesis that assumes a novel module that accommodates these data and provide an existence proof in the form of a simulation.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 22-10-2014
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 07-2016
DOI: 10.1016/J.CONCOG.2016.05.001
Abstract: People who experience auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) vary in whether they believe their AVHs are self-generated or caused by external agents. It remains unclear whether these differences are influenced by the "intensity" of the voices, such as their frequency or volume, or other aspects of their phenomenology. We examined 35 patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder who experienced AVHs. Patients completed a detailed structured interview about their AVHs, including beliefs about their cause. In response, 20 (57.1%) reported that their AVHs were self-generated, 9 (25.7%) were uncertain, and 6 (17.1%) reported that their AVHs were caused by external agents. Several analytical approaches revealed little or no evidence for associations between either AVH intensity or phenomenology and beliefs about the AVH's cause the evidence instead favoured the absence of these associations. Beliefs about the cause of AVHs are thus unlikely to be explained solely by the phenomenological qualities of the AVHs.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 2008
DOI: 10.1037/0096-1523.34.1.242
Abstract: There are numerous reports in the visual word recognition literature that the joint effects of various factors are additive on reaction time. A central claim by D. C. Plaut and J. R. Booth (2000, 2006) is that their parallel distributed processing model simulates additive effects of stimulus quality and word frequency in the context of lexical decision. If correct, this success would have important implications for computational accounts of reading processes. However, the results of further simulations with this model undermine this claim given that the joint effects of stimulus quality and word frequency yield a nonmonotonic function (underadditivity, additivity, and overadditivity) depending on the size of the stimulus quality effect, whereas skilled readers yield additivity more broadly. The implications of these results both locally and more globally are discussed, and a number of other issues are noted. Additivity of factor effects constitutes a benchmark that computational accounts should strive to meet.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 06-2010
DOI: 10.1037/A0018741
Abstract: Two lexical decision experiments examined the joint effects of stimulus quality, semantic context, and cue-target associative strength when all factors were intermixed in a block of trials. Both experiments found a three-way interaction. Semantic context and stimulus quality interacted when associative strength between cue-target pairs was strong, and the interaction was eliminated when the strength was weak. These results support a role for a local mechanism that relies on trial specific information, in addition to a mechanism that makes use of global information available across a block of trials. The absence of an interaction between the joint effects of semantic context and stimulus quality is attributed to blocking the feedback from the semantic system to the orthographic system, functionally separating the orthographic and semantic modules.
Publisher: American Astronomical Society
Date: 18-12-2017
Publisher: IOP Publishing
Date: 12-04-2017
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 16-10-2017
DOI: 10.1038/NATURE24471
Abstract: On 17 August 2017, the Advanced LIGO and Virgo detectors observed the gravitational-wave event GW170817-a strong signal from the merger of a binary neutron-star system. Less than two seconds after the merger, a γ-ray burst (GRB 170817A) was detected within a region of the sky consistent with the LIGO-Virgo-derived location of the gravitational-wave source. This sky region was subsequently observed by optical astronomy facilities, resulting in the identification of an optical transient signal within about ten arcseconds of the galaxy NGC 4993. This detection of GW170817 in both gravitational waves and electromagnetic waves represents the first 'multi-messenger' astronomical observation. Such observations enable GW170817 to be used as a 'standard siren' (meaning that the absolute distance to the source can be determined directly from the gravitational-wave measurements) to measure the Hubble constant. This quantity represents the local expansion rate of the Universe, sets the overall scale of the Universe and is of fundamental importance to cosmology. Here we report a measurement of the Hubble constant that combines the distance to the source inferred purely from the gravitational-wave signal with the recession velocity inferred from measurements of the redshift using the electromagnetic data. In contrast to previous measurements, ours does not require the use of a cosmic 'distance ladder': the gravitational-wave analysis can be used to estimate the luminosity distance out to cosmological scales directly, without the use of intermediate astronomical distance measurements. We determine the Hubble constant to be about 70 kilometres per second per megaparsec. This value is consistent with existing measurements, while being completely independent of them. Additional standard siren measurements from future gravitational-wave sources will enable the Hubble constant to be constrained to high precision.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 18-01-2023
Publisher: American Physical Society (APS)
Date: 04-09-2019
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 29-03-2022
DOI: 10.1111/CDEV.13753
Abstract: This study explored whether a daytime nap aids children's acquisition of letter-sound knowledge, which is a fundamental component for learning to read. Thirty-two preschool children in Sydney, Australia (M
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 06-07-2023
Abstract: Poor reading has been linked to negative outcomes on a wide range of psychosocial dimensions in children. However, little is known about the time course of these associations. In this study we analyse data from the Finnish Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia (N=199 106 boys) which included measures of adaptability, aggression, anxiety, attention, atypicality, depression, hyperactivity, social skills, somatization and withdrawal at ages 4, 5, 6 (pre-school), 8, and 9. Reading fluency was assessed in Grade 1 (age 7 or 8). In a series of stepwise regression models, we assessed whether pre-school psychosocial measures were associated with reading fluency, and whether reading fluency was associated with later psychosocial development, after controlling for family-risk of dyslexia and the children’s non-verbal IQ. We also examined whether associations between reading and psychosocial development differed between boys and girls. Consistent with previous longitudinal studies, we found that of the pre-school measures, only symptoms of attention difficulties were associated with poorer reading outcomes in Grade 1. Associations between reading fluency and pre-school measures of atypicality and somatization (not significant as main effects) interacted with gender, but are difficult to interpret. Also consistent with other studies, we found that poor reading fluency in Grade 1 was associated with increased symptoms of anxiety in children at ages 8 and 9. Gender did not moderate any associations between reading fluency and later measures of psychosocial development.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 09-2018
DOI: 10.1037/XLM0000524
Abstract: This research examines the acquisition of letter-position processing. Study 1 investigated letter-position processing in Grades 1-6 and adult readers, using the occurrence of specific error types as the outcome measure. Between Grades 1 and 2, there was a shift from making more other-word to making more letter-position errors. This shift was a function of reading proficiency, not of years of reading instruction. Based on the multiple-route model of reading development (Grainger, Lété, Bertand, Dufau, & Ziegler, 2012), we argue that the fact that children make fewer other-word errors (i.e., mostly letter-identity errors) opens up the opportunity for them to make "the more advanced" letter-position errors. Finally, skilled adult readers still made fewer letter-position errors than typical readers in Grade 6, suggesting that the acquisition process is not finalized by the end of primary school. In Study 2, we directly compared letter-position processing with letter-identity processing. Thirty children in Grade 3 and 30 children in Grade 4 read aloud words with and without higher-frequency distractors. Children more often misread a word with a higher-frequency distractor than without such a distractor and this effect was stronger for below-average than for above-average readers. Converging with the results of Study 1, we found that a letter-position distractor is more disruptive than a letter-identity distractor. These results confirm that the acquisition of letter-position processing lags behind of that of letter-identity processing. The results are discussed within the framework of the Lexical Tuning Hypothesis (Castles, Davis, Cavalot, & Forster, 2007), which stresses the importance of feedback between letter (identity and position) coding and (developing) orthographic representations. (PsycINFO Database Record
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 11-04-2018
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 12-2016
DOI: 10.1037/XHP0000273
Abstract: Studies have shown that letter position processing changes as reading develops. Whether these changes are driven by the development of the orthographic lexicon is currently unclear. In this study, we administered a novel variant of the Reicher-Wheeler task to children aged 7-12 years (Experiment 1) and adults (Experiment 2) to clarify the role of the developing lexicon in letter position processing. The task required participants to report the identity of a letter at a specified position within 3 orthographic contexts: anagram words (e.g., slime - which has the anagram partner, smile), pseudowords (e.g., blire - brile), and illegal nonwords (e.g., bfgsv - bsgfv). The influence of a reader's whole-word orthographic representations was investigated by comparing the performance of words to pseudowords (word superiority effect or WSE), and the influence of their knowledge of orthotactic constraints was investigated by comparing pseudowords to illegal nonwords (pseudoword superiority effect or PSE). While the PSE increased with developing orthographic skills (as indexed by irregular word reading) in primary schoolchildren, the WSE emerged only in adult readers. Furthermore, the size of the WSE increased with orthographic skill in adults. The findings are discussed in regards to current models and theories of visual word recognition and reading development. (PsycINFO Database Record
Publisher: American Astronomical Society
Date: 16-10-2017
Publisher: American Physical Society (APS)
Date: 30-09-2019
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 12-07-2017
DOI: 10.1111/DESC.12577
Abstract: There is an established association between children's oral vocabulary and their word reading but its basis is not well understood. Here, we present evidence from eye movements for a novel mechanism underlying this association. Two groups of 18 Grade 4 children received oral vocabulary training on one set of 16 novel words (e.g., 'nesh', 'coib'), but no training on another set. The words were assigned spellings that were either predictable from phonology (e.g., nesh) or unpredictable (e.g., koyb). These were subsequently shown in print, embedded in sentences. Reading times were shorter for orally familiar than unfamiliar items, and for words with predictable than unpredictable spellings but, importantly, there was an interaction between the two: children demonstrated a larger benefit of oral familiarity for predictable than for unpredictable items. These findings indicate that children form initial orthographic expectations about spoken words before first seeing them in print. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: youtu.be/jvpJwpKMM3E.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 2009
DOI: 10.1037/A0013162
Abstract: Can readers exert control (albeit unconsciously) over activation at particular loci in the reading system? The authors addressed this issue in 4 experiments in which participants read target words aloud and the factors of prime-target relation (semantic, repetition), context (related, unrelated), stimulus quality (bright, dim), and relatedness proportion (RP high, low) were manipulated. In the high RP condition (RP = .5), an interaction between semantic context and stimulus quality was observed in which low stimulus quality slowed unrelated targets more than related ones, replicating previous work. In contrast, the low RP condition (RP = .25) yielded additive effects of semantic context and stimulus quality. However, when low RP was examined within the context of repetition priming, context and stimulus quality once again interacted. These results are discussed in the context of a widely endorsed framework with the addition of the central assumption that there is control over feedback between various levels.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 07-09-2023
Publisher: University of California Press
Date: 2017
DOI: 10.1525/COLLABRA.72
Abstract: Previous studies have found that words and nonwords with many body neighbours (i.e., words with the same orthographic body, e.g., cat, brat, at) are read faster than items with fewer body neighbours. This body-N effect has been explored in the context of cross-linguistic differences in reading where it has been reported that the size of the effect differs as a function of orthographic depth: readers of English, a deep orthography, show stronger facilitation than readers of German, a shallow orthography. Such findings support the psycholinguistic grain size theory, which proposes that readers of English rely on large orthographic units to reduce ambiguity of print-to-speech correspondences in their orthography. Here we re-examine the evidence for this pattern and find that there is no reliable evidence for such a cross-linguistic difference. Re-analysis of a key study (Ziegler et al., 2001), analysis of data from the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007), and a large-scale analysis of nine new experiments all support this conclusion. Using Bayesian analysis techniques, we find little evidence of the body-N effect in most tasks and conditions. Where we do find evidence for a body-N effect (lexical decision for nonwords), we find evidence against an interaction with language.
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 27-02-2017
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 11-04-2015
DOI: 10.3758/S13423-015-0830-7
Abstract: The debate about whether or not visual word recognition requires spatial attention has been marked by a conflict: the results from different tasks yield different conclusions. Experiments in which the primary task is reading based show no evidence that unattended words are processed, whereas when the primary task is color identification, supposedly unattended words do affect processing. However, the color stimuli used to date does not appear to demand as much spatial attention as explicit word reading tasks. We first identify a color stimulus that requires as much spatial attention to identify as does a word. We then demonstrate that when spatial attention is appropriately captured, distractor words in unattended locations do not affect color identification. We conclude that there is no word identification without spatial attention.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 06-2016
Abstract: The standard view in cognition is that the identification of visually presented words, up to and including semantic activation, is automatic in various senses. The perspective favored here is that various kinds of attention are intimately involved in the identification of words. Some forms of attention are necessary, whereas others (i.e., executive attention) are recruited to optimize performance. We briefly review results from a variety of literatures that (a) support the latter perspective and (b) are difficult to reconcile with an automatic-processing account.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 08-2022
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 13-06-2021
DOI: 10.1002/RRQ.426
Abstract: There is good evidence for an association between poor reading and anxiety, but the mechanisms responsible for this association are currently unknown. In this study, we used structural equation modeling of four large longitudinal databases from the United Kingdom ( n = 7,870), the United States ( n s = 8,001 and 7,160), and Australia ( n = 768) to explore relations between reading and emotional health across childhood. We found that emotional health at age 5 was not related to reading at age 7 but that reading at 7 was related to emotional health at age 9 or 11. We also found that reading, behavior, and attention may be related across development. These findings suggest a working hypothesis that poor reading may have an influence on emotional health rather than vice versa.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 17-05-2022
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 31-03-2014
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 05-2014
DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2013.838686
Abstract: Whether or not lexical access from print requires spatial attention has been debated intensively for the last 30 years. Studies involving colour naming generally find evidence that “unattended” words are processed. In contrast, reading-based experiments do not find evidence of distractor processing. One theory ascribes the discrepancy to weaker attentional demands for colour identification. If colour naming does not capture all of a subject's attention, the remaining attentional resources can be deployed to process the distractor word. The present study combined exogenous spatial cueing with colour naming and reading aloud separately and found that colour naming is less sensitive to the validity of a spatial cue than is reading words aloud. Based on these results, we argue that colour naming studies do not effectively control attention so that no conclusions about unattended distractor processing can be drawn from them. Thus we reiterate the consistent conclusion drawn from reading aloud and lexical decision studies: There is no word identification without (spatial) attention.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 17-12-2013
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 03-06-2022
DOI: 10.1002/ACP.3970
Abstract: There is a reliable association between poor reading and anxiety, but we do not completely understand the specifics of this relationship. The current study included a s le of children ( N = 284 M age = 9.30, SD age = 1.31) who completed a reading (word, nonword, and text reading accuracy, word, nonword, and text reading fluency, passage reading comprehension) and anxiety (social anxiety, generalized anxiety, separation anxiety, physical injury fears hobias, panic, obsessive compulsive symptoms) assessment. Analyses included bivariate and partial correlations, principal components analysis, and hierarchical clustering. We found a very tentative suggestion in the data that there may be a specific yet weak association between reading accuracy and social anxiety. The clinical implications and directions for future research are discussed.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 06-2011
DOI: 10.1037/A0021642
Abstract: Skilled readers are slower to read aloud exception words (e.g., PINT) than regular words (e.g., MINT). In the case of exception words, sublexical knowledge competes with the correct pronunciation driven by lexical knowledge, whereas no such competition occurs for regular words. The dominant view is that the cost of this "regularity" effect is evidence that sublexical spelling-sound conversion is impossible to prevent (i.e., is "automatic"). This view has become so reified that the field rarely questions it. However, the results of simulations from the most successful computational models on the table suggest that the claim of "automatic" sublexical phonological recoding is premature given that there is also a benefit conferred by sublexical processing. Taken together with evidence from skilled readers that sublexical phonological recoding can be stopped, we suggest that the field is too narrowly focused when it asserts that sublexical phonological recoding is "automatic" and that a broader, more nuanced and contextually driven approach provides a more useful framework.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 10-2021
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 2007
Publisher: American Astronomical Society
Date: 07-04-2017
No related grants have been discovered for Serje Robidoux.