Published in: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Volume 30, Issue 4, April 2018, 514-525 Abstract “Understanding the neural basis of recovery from stroke is a major research goal. Many functional neuroimaging studies have identified changes in brain activity in people with aphasia, but it is unclear whether these changes truly support successful performance or merely reflect increased task difficulty. We addressed this problem by examining differences in brain activity associated with correct and incorrect responses on an overt reading task. On the basis of previous proposals that semantic retrieval can assist pronunciation of written words, we hypothesized that recruitment of semantic areas… Read More
Lexical olfaction recruits olfactory orbitofrontal cortex in metaphorical and literal contexts
Published in: Brain and Language, Volume 179, April 2018, 11-21 Abstract “The investigation of specific lexical categories has substantially contributed to advancing our knowledge on how meaning is neurally represented. One sensory domain that has received particularly little attention is olfaction. This study aims to investigate the neural representation of lexical olfaction. In an fMRI experiment, participants read olfactory metaphors, their literal paraphrases, and literal olfactory sentences. Regions of interest were defined by a functional localizer run of odor processing. We observed activation in secondary olfactory areas during metaphorical and literal olfactory processing, thus extending previous findings to the novel source… Read More
Sluggish dorsally-driven inhibition of return during orthographic processing in adults with dyslexia
Published in: Brain and Language, Volume 179, April 2018, 1-10 Abstract “Dyslexia (D) is a neurodevelopmental reading disorder characterized by phonological and orthographic deficits. Before phonological decoding, reading requires a specialized orthographic system for parallel letter processing that assigns letter identities to different spatial locations. The magnocellular-dorsal (MD) stream rapidly process the spatial location of visual stimuli controlling visuo-spatial attention. To investigate the visuo-spatial attention efficiency during orthographic processing, inhibition of return (IOR) was measured in adults with and without D in a lexical decision task. IOR is the delay in responding to stimuli displayed in a cued location after a… Read More
Beyond cloze probability: Parafoveal processing of semantic and syntactic information during reading
Published in: Journal of Memory and Language, Volume 100, June 2018, 1-17 Abstract “Theories of eye movement control in reading assume that early oculomotordecisions are determined by a word’s frequency and cloze probability. This assumption is challenged by evidence that readers are sensitive to the contextual plausibility of an upcoming word: First-pass fixation probability and duration are reduced when the parafoveal preview is a plausible, but unpredictable, word relative to an implausible word. The present study sought to establish whether the source of this effect is sensitivity to violations of syntactic acceptability. In two experiments, the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm was used to compare contextually… Read More
Elaborative feedback: Engaging reward and task-relevant brain regions promotes learning in pseudoword reading aloud
Published in: Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, Volume 18, Issue 1, 68-87 Abstract “Although much is known about the cognitive and neural basis of establishing letter-sound mappings in learning word forms, relatively little is known about what makes for the most effective feedback during this process. We sought to determine the neural basis by which elaborative feedback (EF), which contains both reward-related and content-specific information, may be more helpful than feedback containing only one kind of information (simple positive feedback, PF) or the other (content feedback, CF) in learning orthography-phonology (spelling-sound) mappings for novel letter strings. Compared to CF, EF activated… Read More
Individual variability in the semantic processing of English compound words
Published in: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Volume 44, Issue 3, 421-439 Abstract “Semantic transparency effects during compound word recognition provide critical insight into the organization of semantic knowledge and the nature of semantic processing. The past 25 years of psycholinguistic research on compound semantic transparency has produced discrepant effects, leaving the existence and nature of its influence unresolved. In the present study, we examined the influence of semantic transparency and individual reading experience on eye-movement behavior during sentence reading. Eye-movement data were collected from 138 non–college-bound 16- to 26-year-old speakers of English in a sentence-reading task representing… Read More
What are the costs of degraded parafoveal previews during silent reading?
Published in: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Volume 44, Issue 3, 371-386 Abstract “It has been suggested that the preview benefit effect is actually a combination of preview benefit and preview costs. Marx et al. (2015) proposed that visually degrading the parafoveal preview reduces the costs associated with traditional parafoveal letter masks used in the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975), thus leading to a more neutral baseline. We report 2 experiments of skilled adults reading silently. In Experiment 1, we found no compelling evidence that degraded previews reduced processing costs associated with traditional letter masks. Moreover, participants were highly… Read More
Automatic semantic integration during L2 sentential reading
Published in: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Volume 21, Issue 2, 375-383 Abstract “Research has shown that L1 speakers can routinely generate mental imagery corresponding to sentence meaning in reading comprehension. This may reflect an efficient process of semantic integration in which information from the input combines with an individual’s linguistic and real world knowledge to form a semantic representation of a sentence. Semantic integration in L2 reading has received limited attention. The present study attempted to examine the activation of mental imagery in reading among L2 speakers and thus to assess the efficiency of semantic integration during L2 reading. L2 Korean… Read More
Two distinct parsing stages in nonword reading aloud: Evidence from Russian
Published in: The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Volume 70, Issue 12, 2548-2559 Abstract “Word reading partly depends on the activation of sublexical letter clusters. Previous research has studied which types of letter clusters have psychological saliency, but less is known about cognitive mechanisms of letter string parsing. Here, we take advantage of the high degree of context-dependency of the Russian orthography to examine whether consonant–vowel (CV) clusters are treated as units in two stages of sublexical processing. In two experiments using a nonword reading task, we use two orthogonal manipulations: (a) insertion of a visual disruptor (#) to assess whether… Read More